The amount of storage any given organization manages is tied directly to its size: large companies (by annual revenue) now average on the order of 1 Petabyte of data, midsize companies on the order of 100 Terabytes, and small companies on the order of 10T of data. However, small companies expect mean storage growth of 42% in 2009 and 26% in 2010, as compared with only 17% growth in both years for midsize companies and 18% in large companies for 2009, 15% in 2010.
Many things drive storage growth, separately and in combination, including continued digitization of business processes and documents, of which the move to unified messaging is a significant part, and retention of more data for longer periods. “It’s scary, the rate at which it’s growing. Much of what’s driving it is e-mail archiving,” says a data center director at an insurance company.
The lower growth rates in midsize and large companies suggest that they are ahead with respect to digitization, and especially with having some controls on storage growth. “We started doing deduplication and are implementing a data retention policy, which we have never had before!” says a professional services IT director at a firm currently expecting no storage growth in the coming two years.
