Backup/archival and email topped the list of projects that are most likely to require additional storage within the next 12 months, according to the recent Computerworld Singapore Information Management and Storage Survey, which was conducted in March.
This is hardly surprising, given the increased prevalence of electronic documents and their legal and regulatory status in the business world. In a landmark ruling early this month, the Singapore High Court upheld a lease agreement made via email, although no paper document had actually been signed.
According to the survey findings, which were presented at the EMC forum Make Storage Simple last week, about 44.2 percent of respondents cited backup/archival as one of the projects most likely to require additional storage in the coming year, while 29.9 percent cited email.
Other storage gluttons include e-commerce/web services (29.9 percent) and enterprise resource planning (26 percent).
As a result of this demand, the Computerworld poll also found that 87 percent of respondents expect their storage capacity requirements to increase over the next 12 months.
Research firm AMI Partners has predicted that SMBs in the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), who invested more than US$400 million in storage in 2004, is expected to up their spending by over 45 percent this year.
In Singapore, external TB capacity shipped rose by 93 per cent from 2.426T bytes in 2003 to 4,682T bytes in 2004, according to IDC.
This exponential growth in storage has led to another set of challenges. In the Computerworld poll, about 37.7 percent of respondents cited time and cost of storage administration and management as one of the major problems they were encountering with their information management solutions. Poor scalability came in second (28.6 percent) and backup and archiving problems a close third (27.3 percent).
The survey also revealed that many IT organizations are focusing on the basics: acquiring/managing the necessary storage hardware or software within current budget limits and improving the backup/restore processes. The results clearly indicate that financial-related considerations are still a major focus among IT managers and professionals.