Survey of IT Managers Reveals Key Budgeting Trend

Disk-based data protection provider SEPATON, a company that likes to raise its voice in type by spelling its name in all capital letters [we at eWEEK also follow that convention], recently asked about 400 IT managers what their top priorities are regarding data center protection for 2010.

The result of the survey coordinated by respected storage expert and SEPATON exec Jay Kramer was a set of interesting data points. For example:

–Nearly 75 percent of respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or decrease in 2010. It’s modestly good news that 25 percent see increasing budgets for this year.

–No surprise here: The key focus of spending in 2010 will be on disaster recovery, data deduplication, VTL [virtual tape libraries], and other disk-based products.

–No surprise here, either: Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data; nearly half of enterprise respondents reported more than 200TB of data to protect.

—Time and labor costs required to protect and manage data are significant; 43 percent of respondents need more than 24 hours to complete a full backup. 11 percent needed more than 20 full-time employees to manage their data protection.

–Interesting: While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, most do not expect to be using tape a year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies (VTL and disk-to-disk) as well as cloud and managed service providers (MSP) in 2010.

—Disaster recovery is a key priority in the enterprise data center; almost half percent of respondents are not currently meeting their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and ROP) in a consistent manner. 70 percent of respondents cited improving disaster recovery protection as their most important goal for 2010.

—Companies want longer online data retention: Only 26 percent of respondents are retaining their data online for 120 days. However, 40 percent would increase their online data retention to 120 days if implementing deduplication made longer retention cost-effective.

All good food for thought. Where do you fit into these numbers?