Fred Engel, SVP of
Engineering & CTO,
Iron Mountain Digital:
“Storage-as-a-Service
can make your data
not just safe and
secure but useful too.”
In a call for research, Chandler
writes: “Storage-as-a-Service is
becoming a viable alternative for
enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, and individual
customers who need to store digi-
tal data and would prefer to procure storage services and
storage capacity as a hosted service rather than as an onsite
product or set of products. Using a storage service can
provide assurance that they are meeting requirements and
will have enough capacity to account for future growth.”
Data In, Value Out
Storage-as-a-Service model enables CIOs
to focus on business value
“CIOs are being asked what they’re getting out of all the
money they spent on IT last year and are aiming to take
out costs through efforts like outsourcing.”
—The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2008
CIOS TODAY ARE WORKING TO
concentrate their efforts on the
bottom line instead of just “
keeping the lights on.” In fact, their priorities have been shifting steadily
toward business outcomes and away
from technology-centric initiatives. According to the 2008 “State
of the CIO” survey by CIO Magazine, these executives are focused
on enabling business innovation,
creating competitive advantage and
growing existing revenue streams.
For many, outsourcing critical but non-core business
processes and activities like application development and
help-desk functions has helped them refocus their attention on the business.
And in light of the pressures resulting from significant trends in data management, Storage-as-a-Service is
emerging as a model for capturing, storing and protecting
data, and putting that critical business data into action.
While early in the adoption stage, the Storage-as-a-Service concept shows tremendous promise, according to IDC
analyst Doug Chandler.
BOTTOM LINE
A rich set of services
applied to outsourcing data capture,
protection, storage
and management
can lower costs and
risks for CIOs, while
enabling them to
focus on aligning IT
with business goals.
Challenges in Data Management
When it comes to data protection, rising storage costs, the
threat of litigation and regulatory compliance demands
make secure and efficient data protection and storage dif-
ficult at best. A recent study conducted by IDG Research
Services in conjunction with Iron Mountain indicates these
key challenges:
n Out-of-control IT costs (difficult to control and pre-
dict costs)
n Data loss concerns (inadvertent disclosure, e.g., data
breaches; identity theft)
n Risk exposure (noncompliance, litigation)
n Data growth explosion
n Unmanageable distributed data ecosystem
Thus, CIOs face real difficulties in managing information, protecting and storing it, and ensuring the relevant
data is accessible whenever needed.
The overhead and operating expenses of the Costs +
Data Explosion + Distributed Data means CIOs are
often challenged to manage, protect, store and make
data accessible.
On top of that, companies may be spending too much
money backing up too much data that is stored for too
much time. Iron Mountain research shows that 42 percent
of those that do archive say their backup is their archive.
That suggests plenty of room for improvement in data
management.
“Many organizations are keeping everything for as
long as possible, and that’s not always smart,” says Karen
McPhillips, Iron Mountain Digital’s vice president of marketing. “They’re myopic about storage. They’re looking at
cost and human bandwidth efficiencies. But the big question is, What makes that data or information beneficial to
the organization, and over what period of time?”
The Case for Outsourcing
In today’s fast-changing environment, CIOs cannot afford to
overlook the expertise, speed-to-market and cost benefits
that outsourcing can deliver. Outsourcing not only helps
CIOs create business value better, faster and cheaper, it also
provides valuable new insights into their own data management, protection and storage policies—or lack thereof.
