IDC finds demand for Storage-as-a-Service has very strong commercial demand among small, mid-size, and large firms that are facing budgetary and IT staffing pressures. Companies are evaluating online services for backup/disaster recovery, long-term record retention, business continuity, and availability.
In both the commercial and consumer segments, the availability of storage-as-a-service is disrupting traditional storage software markets as it changes how individuals and firms access storage capacity and procure software functions. But, more importantly, storage-as-a-service is a precursor to the longer term cloud storage and cloud computing opportunity.
“As consumers and business organizations continue to generate vast amounts of data and seek optimum methods to store and protect them, the growth of storage capacities delivered through storage-as-a-service offerings will outpace traditional storage architectures,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager for Storage and Data Management Services at IDC. “With storage-as-a-service capacity growing over 65% in 2007 to over by 2012, the market is rife with opportunity.”
“Today in the commercial context, online backup and archiving services are the immediate manifestation of the longer term opportunity for a series of cloud-based services which will impact the storage industry,” said Laura DuBois, program director for Storage Software at IDC. “Storage-as-a-service will take place in two phases: first as a way to enable protection, recovery, long-term retention, and business continuity, and second as a by-product of larger cloud computing initiatives.”
Among IDC’s key finding are:
- IT managers should look for suppliers that offer a breadth of services to satisfy a range of use cases for storage-as-a-service.
- Storage-as-a-service is of interest as a lower cost alternative to on-premise solutions and secondarily in support of limited IT staff.
- Many firms prefer suppliers whose focus is on online services and for those that have a strong technical background.
For IT vendors IDC’s has just released a study called Storage-as-a-Service: Commercial Opportunities, provide a holistic picture of the storage-as-a-service opportunity. These reports forecast customer spending and identifying strategies to overcome barriers to entry which will help vendors build a sound go-to-market plan and capitalize on the storage-as-a-service opportunity.
Posted under Cloud Computing, SaaS, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on November 11, 2008
