Data appetite stays huge: Survey reveals

UK: A new survey conducted by online backup provider Databarracks reveals that 50 per cent of all companies polled expect to see data capacity needs doubling over the next 12 months. In addition, 87 per cent of responding firms said they expected some storage growth over the next year.

The Data Health Check survey is carried out every year, with over a thousand firms of varying sizes taking part. The survey aims to pick out current trends in online backup  practices, as well as IT business continuity and IT Disaster Recovery usages and technologies.

Databarracks’ Managing Director Peter Groucutt said in a press note, “In the current economic climate the tendency is to cut expenditure wherever possible. Despite the global downturn, it appears that companies are still expecting to see fairly sharp increases in the amount of data that they need to protect, this is set to remain fairly difficult with the rate of data growth and data centres struggling with capacity”.

The report also looked at several other areas of online backup  data storage and related practices. It found that almost 300 exabytes of data is generated on an annual basis. It also found that data storage is likely to increase exponentially, with corresponding storage facilities being required to keep up.