Many things drive storage growth, separately and in combination:
continued digitization of business processes and documents.
continually expanding amount of data associated with a given process.
increasing size of many files, both because of document format changes and because so much data is now in the form of digital media (e.g.voice mail attached to e-mail).
retention of more data and for longer periods: many companies still either have no retention policies controlling what is kept and what is deleted, or they have a “keep everything, forever” policy aimed at making sure that they never have to explain why something called for in a discovery process is no longer available.
poor or nonexistent efforts to limit growth;
Industry plays a significant role in predicting storage needs too. Healthcare companies project mean growth rates of 68% this year and 48% in 2010, where education and manufacturing (the next highest projected rates) expect only 20% to 23% growth in 2009 and 2010. Healthcare is on the negative side of most of the driving factors for storage growth, especially a potent combination of adoption of unified messaging (as part of broader UC efforts) digitization of both paper records and diagnostic imaging. Healthcare companies store an average of 170GB per employee, as compared with 70G, 80G, or 100GB for manufacturing, financial services, and education organizations respectively.
Expected storage growth is strongly related to plans to build new data centers: those planning to build new data centers anticipate their data growing at 40% per year, as opposed to a rate of 20% or less for those not planning new construction.
