Symantec’s survey of 4,506 business and IT executives reveals useful indicators for the storage industry, underscored by its finding that data growth is expected to reach 67 percent for enterprise and 178 percent for SMB during the next year. As many as two-thirds of respondents lost business important information in the previous 12 months.
Symantec’s survey of 4,506 business and IT executives reveals useful indicators for the storage industry, underscored by its finding that data growth is expected to reach 67 percent for enterprise and 178 percent for SMB during the next year. As many as two-thirds of respondents lost business important information in the previous 12 months.
Symantec commissioned ReRez Research to compile the report, which indicates that a typical SMB has 563 terabytes of data across all storage and devices and a typical enterprise has approximately 100,000 terabytes. Per-employee spending on information is higher for SMBs ($3,670) than for enterprises ($3,297).
Respondents estimate that as much as 42 percent of their data is duplicated. Another opportunity is that organizations have fairly low storage utilization rates: 31 percent inside the firewall and 18 percent outside. In the past 12 months:
- 69% lost important business information
- 69% exposed confidential information
- 31% had compliance failures
30 percent of the respondents say information sprawl was somewhat a factor or was a significant factor in these mishaps.
Symantec is in the business of protecting data, so the report does as much to highlight the psychology of data protection as it does the state of storage technology. When executives were asked what would happen if their organization’s information were to be lost with no chance of recovery, the responses included lost customers (49 percent), damage to the brand (47 percent), decreased revenue (41 percent), increased expenses (39 percent), and a decreased stock price (20 percent).
