Your organization isn’t alone in facing data storage challenges – or in solving them.
A new “Voice of the Enterprise” survey by 451 Research reveals the top storage pain points faced by organizations in 2020. Look at the list below and you’ll find your storage issues are shared by many other businesses.
So, how should you tackle them?
We sat down with Henry Baltazar from 451 Research to discuss the pain points and why choosing the right storage provider can help, in a new Zadara video. Baltazar is a Research Vice President specializing in storage.
Learn about the top pain points, read Baltazar’s storage insights, and watch the video – all in this post.
The top storage pain points: growth at #1
451 Research finds the top 5 storage pain points for 2020 were:
- Data/storage growth (named by 53% of respondents)
- Disaster recovery (34%)
- High storage costs/capex (27%)
- Meeting regulatory compliance requirements (26%)
- Achieving adequate storage performance (26%)
For Baltazar, it’s no surprise to see data growth ranked first.
“Data growth is the biggest problem because it compounds other issues,” he says. “When organizations grow quickly, storage costs increase and there’s less time and money to deal with other problems.”
The rate of storage growth is also getting worse. Data volumes grew by 20% in 2019 but growth will approach 25% in 2020.
Budgets, however, are expected to increase by only 10% on average.
“That’s why organizations want flexible opex models,” says Baltazar. “They want to move away from high capex investments so they can get more value from their budgets.”
Zadara was built for flexibility with 100% OpEx enterprise storage, on your premises or with a chosen cloud provider. Organizations also get a fully-managed, pay-only-for-what-you-use service that eliminates your technology risk, operational risk, and financial risk.
The need for easier disaster recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) ranks 2nd on the list, illustrating a shift of attitudes.
“Having an integrated DR solution has become business-critical,” says Baltazar, “because organizations now take availability and improving resilience very seriously.”
“DR requirements are also driven by compliance needs, especially in areas like healthcare.”
But Baltazar believes DR is still too difficult a problem.
“Storage providers should be doing more to help organizations set up and maintain DR,” he says.
“They should be helping with testing, verification of recoveries, and using cloud to remove the cost of running physical DR data centers in multiple locations.”
Zadara works with our partners including Veeam for application and data availability in a flexible, 100%-OpEx backup-as-a-service model that includes, data immutability, on-premises, in the data center, and in the public cloud.
Worried about ransomware? Check out our latest blog from a conversation with our partner, backup and DR experts, Mangecast.
Why your provider matters for cost and performance
Asked what else service providers should be doing to help with storage pain points, Baltazar prioritized flexibility.
“Flexibility is important for performance elasticity” Baltazar says. “Providers should be offering multiple storage tiers, like flash, hybrid, disk, even the latest storage class memory.”
“This enables organizations to add performance on the fly, but also reduce consumption of expensive resources when they’re not needed.
“That’s key to reducing costs and solving performance challenges.”
Organizations also deserve more insight from their storage provider, says Baltazar.
“I’d like to see providers offering proactive monitoring and helping organizations to analyze workloads, so they can plan capacity and use storage tiering effectively.”
Will the right partner cure your pain points?
If your organization is tackling any of the top storage pain points, having the right provider can help you overcome them.
Zadara storage-as-a-service gives you an opex model for storage, flexibility to scale performance and capacity up and down, and a managed service that helps you plan and use storage more effectively.
Want to learn what other pain points topped 451’s list in 2020? Download their new report for more on the top-ranking enterprise storage pain points and how to get more value out of your storage investment while reducing risk.
