Around the world, IT organizations are struggling to manage, protect, and maintain rapidly growing information assets. Getting control of these growth rates—while reducing business risk and optimizing storage management costs—requires IT decision-makers to take a process- and services-oriented approach to managing their storage, information protection, and information security requirements. Rather than dealing with these challenges by simply deploying more and more storage resources, IT managers need to think creatively about how to use technologies, processes, and people to optimize capacity growth rates, respond to external compliance and internal security requirements, and reduce needless data storage, backup, and archiving.
Over the past decade, corporations have routinely created, on average, 60% more data each year. Despite a global economic recession, including staggering unemployment rates, ESG estimates data will still grow by roughly 25% in 2009 as companies look to leverage Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and Wikis to share information inside and outside the organization. When businesses and economies recover, ESG believes annual worldwide information growth rates of 50% to 100% are expected to be the norm again—driven by new rich media content such as video surveillance and high-definition television programming delivered over the web. If there is one constant businesses can count on, it is information growth.
