Meta Group sees tidal wave of storage demand

According study released by the Meta Group this summer, new applications in the areas of e-business, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) are dramatically increasing demands for information storage. IT will also face more demands for change than ever before. The answer, Meta postulates, is envisioning storage from an enterprise standpoint -- a vantage that is doubtless familiar to SearchStorage.com readers. Indeed, Meta suggests that IT staff already "get" this perspective but that business executives may not have come along as far.

Based on interviews with more than 300 companies, Meta found that storage demand is rising far faster than overall IT spending -- a potential problem. Also of concern, most organization still lack centralized storage administration or storage policies -- or in many cases even an awareness of how much storage they have under their control.

In the post 9/11 environment Meta found that backup and recovery remain hot spending areas but more broadly, IT pros are having trouble demonstrating ROI for storage projects and thus, may be stymied in their attempts to justify needed spending.

To combat this problem of how to justify spending, the Meta report recommends that IT organizations "create a portfolio approach to storage services as the foundation for [a] service-level-agreement (SLA)-based chargeback to the business." This approach can clarify the storage value for business

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units and fits with enterprise-wide management principles, the report said.

For more information on this report visit the Meta Group.

More SearchStorage.com resources:

Learn about tough negotiating tactics that can slash at least 20% off major storage purchases from Enterprise Storage Group's Tony Prigmore. Last chance to attend, register here.

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  • Alan Earls often writes about things NAS and SAN in his weekly "SAN/NAS Update: Trends" column. View the latest

    • About the author: Alan Earls is a freelance writer in Franklin, MA.


    This was first published in September 2002

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