Data Protection Still a Priority

By Greg McNevin

December 19, 2008: Enterprise data protection specialist Sepaton has released the results of a new IT budget survey, saying that it shows enterprises are planning to maintain or increase data protection budgets in 2009 despite the economic slowdown.

Conducted in November this year, the survey of large enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and 50 terabytes of primary data to protect covered nearly 600 IT professionals, with 145 responses matching the said criteria.

Sepaton says that the high response rate underscores the top-of-mind nature and importance of data protection, while the survey responses themselves show that despite current economic pressures, nearly 75 percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or increase in 2009.

The company says that enterprises consider the need to protect data assets and to keep pace with data centre growth among their top priorities, and as a key focus of spending in 2009 will be on cost containment technologies for data protection. It claims that enterprises are investing in technologies that reduce total cost of ownership by providing higher levels of data protection, control data growth, and scale capacity and performance.

The survey also found that 52 percent of users who rated their data protection as insufficient cited “lack of budget to keep pace with technology” as the cause.

Sepaton adds that enterprises also see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance.

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