Organisations` data volumes are growing at an average of 60% a year, and an increasing number of companies are showing concern over regulatory compliance, which demands that they store more data, for longer, and manage the process.
Solution marketing manager for former Veritas - now Symantec - Adrian Groeneveld said at a storage briefing in Johannesburg this week that organisations need to understand who is storing what data when and where, and apply controls and rules that will deliver business benefits.
"The need for effective data protection is growing and will continue to grow, and ever-increasing data volumes are demanding new approaches to data protection. Today`s challenges are to manage more with less," Groeneveld said.
Drive Control Corporation product manager Gareth de Laporte stated that businesses are recognising the need for solutions that expand beyond point solutions and deliver business benefits across the enterprise, particularly in the storage arena, where there is an intrinsic link between solutions that offer storage resource management, backup and replication - a form of disaster recovery.
"End-users do not yet fully understand how to manage data and this is costing them up to four times more than it does to simply acquire yet more storage technology to meet their exploding data storage needs," De Laporte said.
"The data and storage management strategy of an organisation needs to be revamped in light of the availability of new, affordable storage solutions that cater for ease of data management rather than just provide more or greater storage capacity."
He added that indiscriminate downloading and storage impacts scarce resources, as well as network availability and the uptime of critical applications.
"A holistic view must be taken, leveraging advances in storage technology that enable simplified and remote management, and enable businesses to extend the life of their current storage technology investments."
He said a combination of storage solutions with the right criteria can assist to resolve many of the glaring challenges being faced by SMEs and corporates alike.
An integrated approach to creating and enforcing a data strategy, which incorporates controls and limitation, has become critical in a business environment where the sheer volume of data has made data management and retrieval unwieldy, representing a significant threat to business enablement, De Laporte said.
He said it has never been more relevant to take stock of the solutions available.
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