More than one in three Irish companies plan to spend more on data storage technology this year even though one fifth of them don’t actually know what capacity their current systems have.
According to figures from the analyst firm iReach, 37pc of companies plan to increase their storage investment.
Irish organisations historically spend a higher proportion of their IT budgets on hardware in comparison to other European markets in Europe and according to iReach this trend will increase in 2007.
IReach business research analyst Sinead Daly commented: “While other hardware lines of servers and networking will also see excellent revenue growth in 2007, storage in particular will see faster growth this year with many companies trying to get control of rapidly growing storage requirements and then ensuring this data is secure and protected.”
Daly added that storage area networks (SANs) would be a significant focus area for larger enterprises in 2007. The iReach survey found that this technology dominates storage priorities with 28pc of companies saying it was their top priority. Tape backups were the next most important area, the data showed.
Although such a large number of organisations are upping their spend for the year, the findings showed that 22pc of companies are unaware of their current storage capabilities. “These results highlight a need for companies to manage their existing storage capabilities more effectively rather than indulge in purchasing more storage capability year after year,” Daly added.
According to the survey, one third of companies (33pc) have between 101-999GB of storage capacity. The leading technology suppliers cited in the survey were, in descending order, Dell, HP and IBM.
The results come from iReach’s third annual survey of 250 IT executives of small, medium and large firms across eight industry verticals in Ireland.
By Gordon Smith
