SMB storage explosion

You know storage has made it to the big time when it appears as the centrefold of a stationery catalogue:‘Buy your rubbers, pencils and a terabyte of storage’.

Such was the experience of a vendor in March and it’s just one indication the pace is really picking up in the SMB storage sector.

The storage needs of small to medium businesses (SMBs are defined by Gartner as companies having one to 499 employees) have been largely ignored for years.

SMBs were not seen as a lucrative market, nor as having the same critical storage issues as large corporates.

As a result, there was a lack of storage solutions to meet their peculiar needs and smaller pockets.

EMC researched the local SMB storage market in March and found the sector has historically received pretty ordinary servicing, according to EMC’s general manager partners and alliances, David Henderson.

Another insight from this research is that the storage issues of the SMB customer are exactly the same as those facing corporate enterprise: data integrity, backup, email, and for some verticals, compliance.

Australian SMBs are starting to hear rumblings about the Sarbanes-Oxley ruling in the US and worry about a flow-on effect locally.

Sarbanes-Oxley is an Act that mandates financial accountability, with emphasis on security and the integrity of electronic ‘paper-trails’ to make sure data hasn’t been tampered with after the fact.

Gartner's Sargeant: Managed storage is growing

This has forced some verticals to look hard at their record management processes, especially the legal, health and financial verticals and particularly those that operate across international borders.

Reports of how long data has to be stored vary from seven to 20 years. Local companies are gearing up already -- despite the absence of this legislation in Australia to date -- in the belief that it won’t be long before they’ll have to follow a similar compliance path.

As far as compliance goes, Gartner’s research director for servers and storage Phillip Sargeant says we’re a little way off than the US, where it’s a big thing. "I’d say what’s biting more than the compliance issues here is the security of information.They have to make sure that it’s secure, they have to make sure that they can store it in the event of some sort of failure," he says.

FalconStor’s regional director for Australia & New Zealand, Joel Norton, agrees: "The world revolves around storage. Ensuring data is safe, protected and secure is 60 percent of an IT manager’s core focus today."