Corporate IT almost ready for online backup, IDC says

The inability of large enterprises to control exploding data growth over the next few years will fuel rapidly increasing corporate use of hosted backup services, according to an IDC report released last week.

In the report the Framingham, Mass.-based IT research firm predicts that online backup revenues will climb to US$715 million in 2011, up from US$235 million in 2007.

Doug Chandler, an IDC analyst, said that providers of online backup services will have to convince corporate users that hosted systems can maintain the data security and strong time-to-restore performance of physical storage servers, especially compared to traditional off-site disaster recovery and regulatory-compliance retention-backup systems.

“There is so much data being generated by individuals that [companies] need to do something about backup,” said Chandler. “There are new pressures to have a strategy in place to be able to know that yes, those files have been stored and will be retrievable for several years.”

He said the entrance of major vendors into the online backup arena over the past 12 months is lending much-needed assurances to IT managers that hosted storage systems are legitimate solutions to their storage problems.

“Powerful brands like EMC, Seagate and IBM [provide] a different equation for enterprise customers. I think that is going to make a big difference,” remarked Chandler. In fact, he said that numerous IDC clients have said that they would try online backup only if it were delivered by their largest storage provider.

In the short term, IDC expects that mostly consumers and small to midsize businesses will use online backup systems. The researcher predicts that vendors will cut prices in the short term to boost corporate demand.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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