Storage-as a service is proving increasingly popular as
the recession bites businesses according to two new survery from
IDC.
Online storage
services are experiencing very large demand in small, mid-size,
and large firms that are facing budgetary and IT staffing
pressures. IDC regards storage-as-a-service as a precursor to the
longer term
cloud storage and cloud computing opportunity.
The research that Storage-as-a-service is of interest as a
lower cost alternative to on-premise solutions and secondarily
in support of limited IT staff. IDC’s research found that among
such firms online storage services were seeing use for
backup/disaster recovery, long-term record retention, business
continuity, and availability.
The availability of storage-as-a-service is disrupting
traditional storage software markets as it changes how individuals
and firms access storage capacity and procure software functions,
IDC revealed.
"As business organisations continue to generate vast amounts of
data and seek optimum methods to store and protect them, the growth
of storage capacities delivered through storage-as-a-service
offerings will outpace traditional storage architectures," said
Brad Nisbet, program manager for Storage and Data Management
Services at IDC. "With storage-as-a-service capacity growing over
65% from 174 petabytes in 2007 to over 2.1 exabytes in 2012, the
market is rife with opportunity."
"Today in the commercial context, online backup and archiving
services are the immediate manifestation of the longer term
opportunity for a series of cloud-based services which will impact
the storage industry," added Laura DuBois, program director for
Storage Software at IDC. "Storage-as-a-service will take place in
two phases: first as a way to enable protection, recovery,
long-term retention, and business continuity, and second as a
by-product of larger cloud computing initiatives."