Growing interest for storage in cloud

MUMBAI, INDIA: CommVault conducted its cloud survey in Dec 2009, in which 10,411 CommVault customers worldwide participated. It was a 12-question online survey to gauge their views on cloud computing and storage.

David West, VP-Marketing and Business Development, CommVault said, “From our latest survey, we know that many of our customers are considering cloud storage to keep pace with rapid data growth and reduce internal IT costs. Still, they are worried about security, complexity and reliability, especially since protecting their mission-critical data remains of paramount importance. To that end, CommVault is working diligently to ease their concerns and ensure that customers will be able to reap the maximum benefits of sound, secure and seamless cloud storage strategies.”

Findings:

-:- The survey garnered 535 responses from companies of all sizes, with half of the responses representing enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. Nearly 60 percent of respondents manage between 6-75TB of data across a variety of small, medium and large-sized enterprises.

-:- 52 per cent of respondents are considering the use of cloud storage services now or in the future. More respondents cited growing data volumes as the #1 reason to evaluate cloud services, followed by storage capacity limits, large datacenter footprints, lengthy retention requirements and costly storage infrastructures.

-:- In order of importance, 33 percent of those polled ranked offsite disaster recovery as the top overarching benefit of moving to cloud storage.

-:- Other potential advantages cited include the ability to replace or supplement tape, as well as the opportunities to leverage flexible pricing models, lower overall costs due to decreased hardware capital expenses.

-:- More than 75 per cent of CommVault customers expressed qualms about moving to a cloud storage model.

-:- Security/privacy was the number one concern as cited by 30 percent of survey participants that ranked security as their number one concern.

-:- While the industry continues to flag concerns about the cost of managing IT and on-premises storage (which also can be significantly reduced by moving data to the cloud), only 17 percent of respondents ranked the cost of deploying cloud services as their first concern. Reliability was a greater concern than cost and was rated as the number one concern by 20 percent of those surveyed; scalability ranked a close fourth overall to cost.

-:- Once data is moved to the cloud, nearly a quarter of the respondents plan to retain it for more than six years, with eight percent of respondents expecting to keep data for more than 10 years.

-:- For customers planning to use the cloud, 31 percent expect to dedicate between 1.6 and 30mbps of network bandwidth exclusively to accessing cloud storage while 15 percent project dedicating between 31 and 130mbps of bandwidth.