The results of the poll, carried out in January by Vanson Bourne, highlight how unprecedented data growth, fragmented backup silos, increased complexity in managing numerous applications and a lack of adequate management tools and forward planning, are taking their toll on data centre performance.
Such high response (broken down as 69 percent in Germany and 76 percent in the UK) suggests that adding backup capacity is difficult, and complicated by the interplay between servers, backup software and target storage devices. Furthermore, as the number of applications continues to increase and the multitude of data storage platforms used concurrently in the modern enterprise continues to grow, IT managers face considerable challenges to ensure data is backed-up but not needlessly duplicated. Siloed secondary data spread across the data centre implies that storage capacity in which businesses have invested is not used optimally, as the same data is often stored repeatedly across these silos.
The results of the survey by Cohesity also highlight that half of IT decision-makers in both the UK and Germany find that managing their backups is too administration-heavy, supporting the notion that explosive data growth and increased complexity have led to extensive storage system fragmentation within the data centre. When it comes to traditional data management solutions, there are numerous independent components, workflows and hardware, and so administrators are compelled to spend far too much of their time managing these various elements.
More than two in five respondents (43 percent) indicated the wish for backup products to be more easily scalable: this lack of flexibility is a major challenge, suggesting that organisations are struggling with wasted capacity and/or with the need for their backup solutions’ ability to grow with the businesses.
“Enterprises are forced to contend with an assortment of backup solutions in their data centres, leading to unnecessarily high set-up costs, but also during the lifetime of the product when it comes to paying for capacity expansion and licence renewals. In addition, there is a waste of administrators’ time who, rather than add business value, are forced to spend valuable time overseeing multiple components and consoles to ensure data is never lost,” said Patrick Rogers, VP of marketing and product management at Cohesity.
Survey Responses: What Are Your Organisation's Biggest Pain Points When It Comes to Managing Backups?
• 73% - Regular need for additional storage capacity
• 50% - Too administration heavy
• 45% - Ensuring regular backups
• 44% - Inadequate performance
• 43% - Inability to easily scale up or down
• 39% - Added complexity due to using multiple storage vendors
• 1% - Other
When analysing the survey findings across vertical sectors such as business and professional services, financial services, IT, retail, distribution & transport, manufacturing, and other commercial sectors, there was little variation apart from decision-makers in the IT sector. Just one quarter of respondents in the IT industry indicated that backups administration is a major challenge, compared with an average of 53 percent across other sectors, corroborating the assertion that organisations that do not have IT at the core of their operations struggle with their data backups.
