BANGALORE: "Business first" was echoed by both the vendors and CIOs
while debating the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized storage
solutions. They were participating in the Dataquest CIO series discussion on
storage solutions.
"Having an in-house storage solution or outsourcing to a storage
solutions provider or an ASP depends on the business needs and the criticality
of the uptime that an enterprise can afford to take. The size of the business
and external competition and sources will drive the initiative for companies to
adopt storage solutions as per their business needs," said StorageTek’s
Vijay Pradhan.
The issue of incremental improvement of the present storage solution rather
than adopting a new storage solution was raised strongly. Other issues included
complexity of a new solutions and cramped bandwidth. Comfortable with the
existing set up, participating enterprise CIOs were looking out for the
incremental improvement in the existing uptime, retrieval of data and increasing
on ROI, etc.
On the issue of the security threat of outsourcing the solutions, the CIOs
expressed uneasiness outsourcing the solutions, though the vendors said the
trends were towards that direction.
"We trust the pilot with our lives and the bank with our money,
similarly we will start to trust somebody with our data. ATM has changed the way
of banking, outsourcing the solution will also adapt itself with enterprises. It
depends on the business needs," said HP’s Owasis Khan.
Big enterprises are however consolidating their storage and with its
infrastructure offering solutions to its group companies, partners and
suppliers. In short: infrastructure, inability to access critical data,
existence of good storage solutions provider are some of the existing issues
that needs immediate attention.