IDC Sees Demand for Services
IDC Sees Demand for Services
November 12, 2008: Storage-as-a-Service has piqued the interest of the analysts at IDC, with the firm finding the area presenting strong demand due to its tight relationship with cloud computing.
According to two new IDC studies, Storage-as-a-Service is more than just a viable alternative, but very much in demand among small, mid-size and large firms facing budget and staffing pressure.
The surveys looked at 812 firms evaluating online services for backup/disaster recovery, long-term record retention, business continuity, and availability. It found that in both the commercial and consumer segments, the availability of storage-as-a-service is disrupting traditional storage software markets as it changes how individuals and firms access storage capacity and procure software functions.
On the consumer front, IDC says that storage-as-a-service opportunities are exploding as individuals need to store fast growing volumes of digital data. They are increasingly considering online services, as an alternative to a product purchase, for backing up, sharing, and preserving data long term.
More importantly, however, IDC says that storage-as-a-service is a precursor to the longer term cloud storage and cloud computing opportunity.
“As consumers and business organisations continue to generate vast amounts of data and seek optimum methods to store and protect them, the growth of storage capacities delivered through storage-as-a-service offerings will outpace traditional storage architectures,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager for Storage and Data Management Services at IDC.
“With storage-as-a-service capacity growing over 65 percent from 174 petabytes in 2007 to over 2.1 exabytes in 2012, the market is rife with opportunity.”
Comment on this story