Businesses Want Remote Access, Data Protection and On-Premises Backup: Survey

A survey finds 46 percent of respondents' storage budgets have remained the same since last year.

A new survey on storage priorities for small and midsize businesses has found that most SMBs (68 percent of those participating in the survey) have one or fewer persons dedicated to IT, while 99 percent say they will not move 100 percent of their storage to the cloud.

In the survey of data storage specialist Drobo's international customer database of IT professionals and business stakeholders, more than half (57 percent) noted that 75 percent or more of their storage will remain on-premises, while 89 percent said that they are unsatisfied with "big box storage" companies' current SMB storage offerings.

A total of 252 respondents completed the survey. Participants included business executives, business managers, IT executives, IT managers and hands-on IT professionals. Participants represented a range of company sizes and industry verticals, according to Drobo.

The survey also found SMBs want remote access, data protection and on-premises backup from their storage provider: 81 percent said it is of medium-high importance to have remote access to their data, and 76 percent noted that on-premises backup is a high storage priority. In addition, 83 percent said that data protection features are a high storage priority, with the next highest being price.

Among participants, 53 percent said they purchased their storage solution online, and 46 percent said their storage budgets have remained the same since last year.

A report earlier this month from TheInfoPro, a division of analyst and data company The 451 Group, found networked storage capacity in the F1000 will grow a projected 24 percent this year, with 44 percent of organizations expecting to increase spending and 31 percent anticipating stable spending. The spending projections nearly mirror what was captured for 2010. The study suggests that 2011 will be a year of strong competition for unified storage leadership. Currently, EMC is the lead vendor for Fibre Channel storage, while NetApp is the lead vendor for NAS (network-attached storage).

The report also found virtual server protection choices may threaten traditional backup software solutions. Rather than traditional methods used to protect physical servers, half of the respondents are using snapshots and replication at the storage level. With this in place, those using backup for protection, rather than archiving, can switch or perhaps remove the traditional backup vendors, knowing they have an alternative protection.