New research, the second annual BridgeHead Software Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Audit, confirms that significant IT data growth continues at a high rate. In both the US and UK there is a continuing trend towards storing more data on primary storage. In 2005 only 16 percent of UK respondents had more than 5 terabytes (TB) of online data, in 2006 this has grown to 22 percent, an increase of over a third. Similarly, those storing in excess of 10TB also increased - by 30 percent.

The degree to which survey respondents believe that primary storage is consumed by redundant data also continues to increase. Over 18 percent more respondents than last year believe they could recoup over 50 percent of their most expensive primary disk space by removing unwanted data. While continued data growth is not surprising in general, the year-to-year comparison captured a clear discrepancy between how different types of data are driving this growth.

Both in the US and UK, the growth of online data is dominated by unstructured data - typically end-user files created outside of an IT-managed application. There has been an 81 percent increase in respondents who calculated that over half of their data was unstructured files. While on the one hand, this dramatic increase may be a leader of greater corporate productivity, it is a potential nightmare for IT managers. User files tend to be created and stored on network file shares without the benefit of IT's most structured management and control systems, making them hard to find, manage and correctly store for compliance and data protection.

In contrast to unstructured data, data held in database applications currently makes up to 30 percent of server data for nearly 75 percent of respondents. For more than two thirds of UK respondents, email data has grown in tandem with overall data growth and still makes up to 20 percent of server-based data.

The ILM Audit reveals that businesses have recognised the need to tackle unstructured files. To the question: "What are your key storage-related areas of interest in the next 12 months?", file archiving has made the biggest leap forward compared to the responses in 2005. There was a 28 percent increase in UK respondents listing file archiving as a key area of interest, whereas e-mail archiving registered a lower increase of 16 percent and disaster recovery was listed as a priority by only 4 percent.

Despite the growing awareness of file archiving, 6 percent of UK respondents said that they would probably not be able to find and restore a three month old file and 27 percent said they didn't know how long retrieval of a 3-month old file would take.

•Date: 31st October 2006• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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