'Capacity, rather than management has traditionally been the driving force behind the SME storage market. Firms are forced to scale up their storage capabilities by ever-increasing data and purchasing decisions have mainly been driven by capacity,' said Chua Meng Pin, senior vice president for channel and storage processes of Computer Associates (CA).
According to a study conducted by IT research firm Gartner, the year-on-year growth of data being managed by SMEs fall anywhere between 30 percent to 50 percent.
'Many decision makers in the SME community used to assume that a disaster will never happen to them and, therefore, forego their need for storage or back-up data,' said EMC Philippines' country manager Ronnie Latinazo, in an interview with Computerworld Philippines.
'The problem with this type of thinking is that most people only consider unlikely events such as human terrorism or natural disasters to affect their organizations. The truth is, software error, human error, and virus attacks are the real culprits for this type of disaster,' Latinazo added.
'Incidents like these are likely to affect smaller companies with fewer IT staff than a large enterprise with a dedicated team assigned to upkeep their in-house technologies,' he said.
Research from the London Chamber of Commerce revealed that 90 percent of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut down within two years.
With this in mind, more SMEs today are beginning to realize that the data they create and receive is crucial to the success of their business performance. They have also begun to realize that losing data could be the easy part while recovery is the hard thing to do.
This year, majority of SMEs are expected to purchase or upgrade storage technologies and solutions to comply with US and national state requirements which will take effect in Asia Pacific, such as Anti Money Laundering, Basel II, Freedom of Information Act, and various privacy laws.
'With compliance requirements in mind, local businesses should consider taking the issue of storage seriously and not just as a U.S. issue,' said Puni Rajah, IDC vice president for research in Asia Pacific.
While SMEs have been struggling with the same storage issues that larger enterprises face, it was only recently that stripped down versions of enterprise products were made available to the SME market.
With the SME storage market emerging as a key growth area, local vendors and resellers are now selling storage management solutions suited to the various requirements and limited budget of small businesses.
For instance, EMC Philippines has introduced storage solution packages that are centered on key business tasks for SMEs, which include consolidation, backup and recovery, information protection, e-mail management, content archiving, and database management.
Solution packages have been bundled with the EMC CLARiiON CX networked storage systems along with various software offerings such as backup software Networker, fixed content management software ApplicationXtender, e-mail archiving software EmailXtender, remote replication software MirrorView, and server virtualization software VMware. Packages start at US$45,000.
Local storage technology distributor Ecoline Systems Corporation is also pushing technologies for disk backup this year as a growing number of SMEs have been upgrading their current tape backups to disk backups.
'Even through simple means, more companies are beginning to acknowledge the need for data storage as they implement to have at least one form of data backup and data protection,' said Ecoline's Ron Flores.
CA Philippines has also introduced Protection Suites, a fully integrated data protection management solution that combines centralized management, security, storage, and data migration technologies.
CA's Protection Suites also allows users to monitor the backup status, get an overview of virus alerts, and monitor the licensing status.
Meanwhile, IBM Philippines has introduced the TotalStorage DR550 Express, a disk array for compliance-based archival needs. The DR550, which uses IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, scales from 1TB to 56TB in 1TB increments. Prices start at $45,000.