LOCAL TECHNOLOGY

THE STAR NEWSPAPER
Thursday December 8, 2011

Managing growing data is main challenge to enterprises

By SUBASHINI SELVARATNAM
bytz@thestar.com.my

Eggleston: "Current storage infrastructure is generally meeting business needs but data growth is the challenge."

KUALA LUMPUR: Data growth is the biggest hurdle to enterprises today, according to Hitachi Data Systems Corp, a storage systems vendor.
"Current storage infrastructure is generally meeting business needs but data growth is the challenge," said Kevin Eggleston, senior vice-president and general manager of Asia Pacific at Hitachi Data Systems Ltd.
"This is because the IT systems are not keeping up with business requirements for deeper insights," he explained.
In all Asia Pacific markets surveyed by industry researcher IDC recently, the IT executives are primarily concerned with data growth, with 56% of respondents citing it as their main challenge.
Eggleston also said that more than 50% of Asia Pacific's large enterprises that participated in the survey, are not anticipating or planning for the advent of big data.
About 67% of the respondents believe their current storage infrastructure is sufficient for the next 12 months.
However, 72% of them do not have a strategy to cope with the growth of unstructured data, such as large multimedia files.
"(All this) data needs to be shared, compared, analysed and visualised more holistically," said Eggleston. "(Only then) can the data become information and be useful as insights for business purposes."
He believes that enterprises need to embrace advanced cloud-computing technologies and solutions to manage their data growth.
However, Eggleston noted, 48% of the respondents are concerned about adopting cloud-based storage solutions due to security fears. He said Hitachi Data Systems would help allay such fears through educational programmes.
Also, he said, enterprises getting into cloud storage should examine their service level agreements to ensure that their security concerns are addressed by the storage service vendor.
More than half of the respondents (60%) said virtualisation is their most adopted technology, followed by disaster recovery (44%), and data encryption (37%).
The survey was conducted from August to September; 150 IT executives from large enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore responded. Hitachi Data Systems commissioned the survey to better understand storage management challenges and strategies.