Keep The Knives Away From Storage

Will storage concerns outweigh security this year? It seems like a stretch but that's what a recent survey by Glass House Technologies indicates. According to Glass House's "2006 Storage Budget Survey", 2006 will be a year for holding down costs and that means IT will be wringing out more efficiency from storage architectures.

Now, Glass House is a provider of independent services that help organizations solve enterprise storage problems and focuses on information lifecycle management (ILM). So yes, you can read vested interest, but the company raises an interesting point. Storage budgets at most organization, large and small, continue to grow and become a natural target for cost cutting, especially after spending all that money on security in 2005.

Do I think those security concerns have diminished enough to move storage to the top of the IT agenda. Not yet; maybe not for a while. And with compliance activities intersecting the security and storage activities, both storage and security will attract major IT attention.

The survey did show some other interesting things about storage. Most companies with annual storage costs of more than $10 million treat storage as a separate budget item from other IT expenditures. And ninety percent of companies with storage expenses higher than $150 million gave storage a separate budget, and 50 to 75 percent of smaller companies did the same.I would imagine a lot of things have their own line items at companies that can afford to spend $150 million on storage. And it is usually the case that when costs in any area reach a certain threshold, they get tracked separately. We saw that with year-one compliance budgets, which were often lumped in with security or risk management costs. But when compliance costs exceeded everyone's budgets, it was tracked separately more often the next year.

The survey also shows a continuing reliance on backup tapes. That's a little disturbing but may speak to one of the ways company's plan to save on storage costs. We continue to see high profile examples of tapes getting lost or stolen. And the ability to quickly recover data from backup tapes to demonstrate compliance or meet legal demands is fairly dismal.

So if the storage environment is one area your company is targeting to help offset security and compliance costs, be smart about it or look somewhere else. The storage environment should facilitate strong security and compliance.