IDC (News - Alert), a research firm that analyzes the various aspects of digital and telecommunications market sectors, has announced in its annual Digital Universe report that during the coming ten years, data stored in various storage systems will increase by 44 times, with the current rate of data growth.

A massive data amount at 0.8 Zettabytes or 800 billion gigabytes in the year 2009, the amount of data growth in recent years has increased manifold due to cascading amounts of corporate data, bolstered by renewed preference for multimedia data, and necessitated by the need to keep and make use of digitized information. As a result, the CIOs and IT managers of the companies are compelled to leverage a number of technology solutions that can help in management of the data at low costs.

In the words of Mohammad Saif, Deputy Director, Consulting, ICT Practice at Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) South Asia and Middle East, as customers become more interactive, companies need to have access to information they might have gathered from previous transactions. With the continuously multiplying information as an outcome of the online interactions of the firms, and the mandate to keep and have access to records as mandated by law, as in the case of the telecoms sector, digitization of records has begun creating a big space for storage consumption at certain places.

Ravi Rajendran, Vice President & General Manager at Hitachi (News - Alert) Data Systems or 'HDS' ASEAN, commented that data growth is a reality that few businesses can afford to ignore, and embattled IT administrators are forced to tackle a multi-pronged problem that is inevitable for most organizations. In order to cope up with the data explosion occurring every year, companies have to adopt a keen foresight of data requirements in their data centers, as they end up buying up to 75 percent more capacity than they actually need due to the way storage is packaged, Rajendran adds.

Although a big number of companies have started virtualization and the cloud as optional measures to tackle the issuers related to the ever expanding data volumes, these solutions are able to address just a part of a multitude of storage issues enterprises face this day. Despite leveraging these options, the remaining portions of the storage debacle are still relegated to backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity, a segment of the enterprise controlled largely by compliance to government regulations.

Apart from it, the unstructured data has seen a high rise in recent times, particularly due to the high-bandwidth connectivity which allows for movement of huge amounts of data over the Internet, although it can be effectively controlled by managing the use of data.

According to Reco Li, Research Manager, Storage of Enterprise Hardware Systems, Domain Research Group, IDC Asia Pacific, the use of data must be viewed separately, as core business applications with mostly structured data must be stored in highperforming disk systems, such as Fiber Channel 'Storage Area Networks' or SANs, in order to be retrieved very quickly. Li noted that the unstructured data, and some nonmission-critical data are secured with IP SANs, NAS systems, and 'Direct Attached Storage' or DAS, which are seeing increased market demands today.

In June 2010, IDC announced that the worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 percent.