Managing data growth is the top budget priority for IT storage spending in 2011, according to the findings of the CommVault Systems IT Storage Spending Survey.
The survey polled a cross-section of more than 350 of its existing global clients.
Those polled include individuals responsible for IT budget allocations encompassing storage and data management such as CIOs, vice-residents and IT directors as well as backup, server and storage group managers or administrators.
According to CommVault, more than 60% of the respondents polled came from organisations with between 500 to 10 000 employees, representing a variety of industry sectors, including government, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, engineering and retail.
The company adds that nearly 50% of the respondents were responsible for managing between 6TB to 25TB of primary data last year; 22% managed less than 25 physical servers while 24% managed less than 25 virtual servers currently.
The survey also determined that following data management as top priorities for storage spending are network and equipment; disaster recovery applications; and data backup and recovery respectively.
budgets would increase in 2011 while almost 50% reported their budgets would remain unchanged in the New Year.
Of that IT budget, 43% of those polled reported allocating up to 10% for overall data protection, while another 36% planned to spend between 11 and 20% of their budget on data protection hardware, software, services/support and media.
Of those surveyed, 54% reported no expected increases in IT headcount in 2011; 20% reported an increase and 26% remained undecided on changes to their staffing in the year ahead.
David West, vice-president of marketing and business development for CommVault, says: “The results of CommVault's IT Storage Spending Survey underscore what our customers have been telling us - the continuing data glut is creating undue cost as well as risk of data loss and business disruption.
They need to fix these problems without dramatically increasing their budgets, which has been a recurring theme for the past several years,” he says.
West adds that in 2011 companies will still need to do more with less.
“But they're also investing more in modern solutions that solve these real-world IT challenges while leveraging budget allocations to the fullest.”
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