Data management; top budget priority for 2011

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to storage company CommVault's latest IT Storage Spending Survey, managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) is the top budget priority for 2011, followed by network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications/software and data back-up and recovery.

Nearly 30 percent of the survey respondents revealed their IT budgets would increase in 2011 while almost 50 percent reported their budgets would remain unchanged in the New Year. Of that IT budget, 43 percent of those polled reported allocating up to 10 percent for overall data protection while another 36 percent planned to spend between 11 and 20 percent of their budget on data protection hardware, software, services/support and media.

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Of those surveyed, 54 percent reported no expected increases in IT headcount in 2011; 20 percent reported an increase and 26 percent remained undecided on changes to their staffing in the year ahead.

More than 60 percent of the respondents polled for this survey came from organizations with between 500 to 10,000 employees, representing a variety of industry sectors, including government, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, engineering and retail.

Nearly 50 percent of the respondents were responsible for managing between six to 25 TBs of primary data last year; 22 percent managed less than 25 physical servers while 24 percent managed less than 25 virtual servers currently.  

More than 40 percent of the survey respondents spent more on backup and recovery, data reduction or backing-up virtual server environments than initially budgeted for in the past year.

In ranking their No. 1 IT budget priority for 2011, however, less than 10 percent cited backup and recovery as their highest budget priority, which underscores the continuing need to allocate funds across a variety of pressing areas, including network and equipment, disaster recovery, as well as applications and software.

In contrast, managing data growth received the top ranking for budget priority with 16 percent of the votes.