As we observe more adoptions of cloud technology for storage, we have noticed a drastic reduction in the storage growth rate by volume and cost. A recently completed IMF benchmark study on storage for a number of large IT organizations revealed some fascinating statistics. The average growth rate year over year across all companies for the last four years was 23%. That did not surprise us but what did come as a bit of a shock is that the rate seems to be slowing. Last year’s average growth was 32% and this year it plummeted to 13%. We did detect a significant increase in the use of technology to reduce storage needs. These methods ranged from de duping to thin provisioning but, in the end, it appears the real driver is the cloud.
Two notable trends include:
1) The raw cost per managed TB appears to be cheaper in the cloud. We all knew this would happen. The question now becomes will it continue to happen as service offerings mature? We all remember when outsourcing was perceived as the low cost alternative.
2) Many of the cloud offerings we have observed charge based on utilized storage. However, interestingly enough, organizations purchasing storage only use a percentage of the storage they purchase. The average utilization for internal IT groups is only 55%. At this rate you can see that paying for usage only, even at a higher per unit cost, could lead to real savings.
We found the storage spend, as a percent of IT spend, to be 5% so the savings can be dramatic. For more information on IT benchmarking and trends please contact us at The Information Management Forum.
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