Aussie SMEs still concerned over compliance
Aussie SMEs still concerned over compliance
March 02, 2005: A study carried out by market research company ACA Research has revealed that most SMEs see data backup, recovery, the archiving of data and the need to upgrade applications as their top main IT priorities.
180 SMEs were interviewed in the survey, carried out during the end of last year on behalf of EMC, which also revealed that the problems with managing information were a result of the need to handle growing amounts of email, manage enterprise resource planning and to store multimedia files and human resources and payroll data.
Speaking at the Kickstart Conference, held at South Stradbroke Island, Jordan Reizes, the marketing director for EMC in Australia and New Zealand, said that the main reason why companies are so worried about archiving and recovery was because of compliance regulations.
"I think a lot of people are looking at the Sarbanes-Oxley and compliance issues and wandering how long do we have to keep information for and what do we have to keep. They are asking themselves, are we o.k. to delete everything after 90 days?
"We do have pretty strict compliance laws, which are more strict than they do have in the U.S.. To me information lifecycle management is about managing data according to its value. About 20 percent of EMC's venue comes from consultancy services, which is the first step towards data classification, which allows companies to know what they've got and how valuable it is to them."
He says that this is process is vital for users who need to solve the problem of knowing what is worth archiving and recovering to help them meet compliance regulations and allow them to access data quickly when they need to carry out crucial tasks.
Steve Redman, the managing director of EMC Australia and New Zealand, said: "Small to medium-sized enterprises account for the majority of businesses operating in Australia. They play a pivotal role in the expansion of the economy and their IT needs have grown along with it.
"The research points to a new trend which says SMEs face the same IT challenges and issues as large corporations. To remain competitive, SMEs are realising they must devote the financial and human resources needed to proactively manage their data and other priorities."
EMC is consciously trying to address these compliance concerns with the recent attachment of metadata search facilities to the Centera array. Centera Seek allows the date to be set on a file so it can be automatically deleted. It can also allow the user to find a file created by a specific person.
The ACA Research survey also revealed that the management of servers, especially in remote locations, was also a big concern for IT managers.
As far as storage is involved, the second biggest concern for SMEs behind backup and archiving is the poor utilization of physical storage.
Other research findings in this study identified that the decision regarding information storage devices is mostly influenced by the IT manager/director, with the CEO and CFO second and third respectively in terms of importance.
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