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The Storage Problem You Can't Ignore: Page 2 of 5

Lay Down The Law

The forces of cloud, mobility, and consumerization are hastening the demise of the fat corporate desktop. In our InformationWeek Analytics 2011 End User Device Management Survey, 67% of 551 respondents said their companies allow email to be accessed over employee-owned gear, and in our cloud storage poll, file storage services are highly popular. What that means for storage admins is that business content is now located on personal laptops, smartphones, and tablets, as well as on Dropbox accounts--a real problem for shops that need to exercise a high level of backup, analysis, and compliance control over data. In response, vendors like Asigra and SugarSync have launched business-class off-site backup protection for mobile devices, and Apple's iCloud can help some shops (see Mobile Device Backup--Still A Work In Progress). But you need policies, not just technology, to solve this problem.

Many CIOs are thinking, Do we really need all this stuff? In most cases, the answer is yes. Analyzing massive amounts of data is how mature companies spot customer trends, dive into analytics, and leverage institutional knowledge. Aggressive data deletion isn't the answer; a comprehensive data retention policy is. It's the foundation of storage governance and for defining technology requirements. Without that baseline, you're throwing dollars at storage willy nilly, and the result is a depleted budget, underutilized technology, and zero ability to plan for the future.

It's encouraging that 89% of respondents to our public cloud survey have formal data retention policies. The bad news? Just 22% say employees comply with it extremely well. Drilling deeper, we see that policies vary by the type of application. Companies are most likely to apply definitive retention and deletion policies to enterprise data warehouses and email; least likely to R&D data sets and Web content.

And having a policy doesn't necessarily equate to a defined deletion date. We were surprised at the number of companies with indefinite data retention requirements for enterprise database/data warehouse and Office documents/SharePoint--even though we included up to 10 years as an option. These applications generate a lot of data, and we expect that these policies will be revisited as full costs become apparent.

Writing data retention policies is a report unto itself, but at minimum, consider how data will be used, searched, and obtained. That will drive the selection of storage technology. Tools like EMC Centera and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager can help enforce policies and enable governance. With Centera, for example, you can preserve original content and provide a higher degree of integrity during the life of your archived information by using application-based record retention and disposition.

Before contracting for external storage services, make sure your data governance tools can extend into the provider's network and manage a mixed environment. Most survey respondents, 53%, use vendor-provided utilities to manage their storage systems. In our experience, they're unlikely to have the depth of visibility needed to make informed decisions. Better are tools such as Nexenta Systems' NexentaStor, Quantum's StorNext, and Quest's Foglight Storage, which can provide a unified view of storage allocation and utilization.

chart: How much of your storage capacity is represented by these technologies?