Enterprises in Asia Pacific Not Prepared for “Big Data”

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), today announced survey results indicating that current storage infrastructure is generally meeting business needs, but data growth is the biggest challenge and IT systems are not keeping up with business requirements for deeper insights and better management of data growth. More than 50% of some of Asia Pacific’s large enterprises that participated in a recent survey are not anticipating or planning for the advent of “big data.” The survey results clearly indicate that enterprises need to embrace advanced cloud technologies and solutions to manage data growth, transform data into actionable information and harness its power as a strategic asset for business insight and innovation. The survey results are published in a HDS-sponsored IDC white paper titled “The Changing Face of Storage: A Rethink of Strategy that Goes Beyond the Data”. The survey was conducted by IDC from August to September 2011 with 150 IT executives from large enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore. HDS commissioned the survey to better understand their storage management challenges and strategies. “The regional survey results reveal varying levels of maturity and understanding of storage management. The challenge of ensuring data relevancy and managing data growth, which ranked among the top five common issues faced, clearly indicates that the anticipated trend toward big data is something few are ready to take on,” said Simon Piff, associate vice president, Asia/Pacific Enterprise Infrastructure Research, IDC. “HDS believes that data and information must be stored, governed and managed for insight and innovation in order to drive strategic and competitive value,” said Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president and general manager, Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific. “Embracing the latest technologies like cloud services not only enable enterprises to manage data growth but also to collect and connect data to create valuable information. Our three-tiered strategy of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud uses a dynamic infrastructure and enables fluid content to gain faster and more sophisticated insight and greater value from stored data.” (Please refer to the Hitachi Data Systems Unveils Roadmap for the Information Cloud and New Cloud Offerings announcement today) Top Three Current Concerns in Asia Pacific In all Asia Pacific markets surveyed, IT executives are primarily concerned with data growth, with 56% of respondents citing it as the main challenge; however, 39% cited increasing utilization levels and 36% cited managing storage for virtualized servers as key challenges. Unstructured data is exploding but many organizations acknowledge that utilization levels have been notoriously low. Of the respondents, 67% believe their current storage infrastructure is sufficient for the next 12 months; however, 72% do not have a strategy to cope with the anticipated growth of unstructured data – the large multimedia, internet-based or other types of multi-gigabyte “big data” that is now increasingly important as a competitive resource for data mining and other business uses. Indeed, 64% stated that business needs for deeper analysis outpace the ability of their systems to ensure the data they have is relevant, timely and useful. Their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it. “Data needs to be shared, compared, analyzed and visualized more holistically. Only then can data become information used for insight, trending, and leveraged proactively in anticipation of things to come,” said Eggleston. “There is a great potential for the information cloud because it will analyze content independently of applications or media and enable analytics of ‘big data’ to better align itself to human behavior for deeper, more relevant insight, driving innovation, advancing research, enabling better collaboration, and building more sustainable societies.” Need to Implement Latest Technologies Many organizations polled cite using the latest technologies to optimize the existing environment (48%) or increasing their IT infrastructure investment (52%) as their preferred approach to addressing their top concerns. The actual detail of responses on storage-specific technologies however, suggests that this is what enterprises are aspiring to do rather than actually doing. Virtualization is the most adopted technology (by 60% of respondents), followed by disaster recovery (44%) and data encryption for security (37%). Only virtualization is adopted by more than 50% of respondents. This indicates that the other technologies that could be aligned to making the systems more efficient, such as data compression, automated tiering and thin provisioning, have not yet been broadly adopted. Out of the respondents, 12% are already using cloud storage services and a further 23% are in process of selecting one. Cloud adoption is expected in its early stage and there is a great growth potential in the next 12 to 18 months. The top concerns on adopting cloud storage are security (48%), followed by loss of control, pricing, and data sovereignty. The split in respondents however, with 34% having no issues or concerns about cloud service, suggests that many will consider cloud storage at some point in the future and it may be merely a matter of time before those who have reservations in this area realize that there are significant benefits.

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