'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.