Document Management Rollup: Enterprises have no Plans for Cloud Storage

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?

We’re not taking to the Cloud

A recent report from Forrester (news, site)  which has just come into general circulation, indicates that the vast majority of both enterprises and SMBs are not, and have no intention of, storing data in the cloud.

While there has been a lot of talk over the past year about moving data to the cloud, from storage vendors and IT professionals alike, it seems that companies are just not buying it.

The report entitled Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage and more tellingly sub-titled Current And Planned Adoption Of Storage-As-A-Service Is Minimal For Now by researcher Andrew Reichman makes interesting reading.

The argument goes: Given that data storage capacities are growing at 30% to 40% per year but storage budgets are flat or growing minimally, IT professionals are eager to take advantage of the low cost per gigabyte offered by cloud providers.

In such a scenario storage vendors are eager to be the ones to provide storage-as-a-service or supply storage systems to the cloud providers.

However, this report and data from Forrester's 2009 hardware survey shows that this is just talk — so far. Only 8% of businesses (enterprise and SMB) have any current plans to utilize cloud storage and only 3% are using it now.

Respondents everywhere and of all company sizes appear to have little interest in moving their data to the cloud any time soon.

There is long-term potential for storage-as-a-service, but Forrester sees issues with guaranteed service levels, security, chain of custody, shared tenancy and long-term pricing as significant barriers that still need to be addressed before it takes off in any meaningful way. 

Is your Data safe?

The days of hackers sitting in grubby apartments pounding the keyboard in the middle of the night are long over. According to a survey of 600 IT and security executives by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) for McAfee, hacking is big business now.

In particular, hacking with a view to stealing all kinds of data. Almost 60% of the respondents said their networks were “under repeated cyber-attack“, often by high-level adversaries such as nation-states, organized crime gangs or terror groups.

However, while that may not be too worrying for private sector companies, the report entitled In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyber War says that the technologies enabling hacking are now very easy to acquire.

The report points out that if the global companies with serious IT budgets are having problems keeping data safe, then smaller operations are going to have even bigger problems. While it doesn’t go so far as to suggest attacks between competing companies will become common place, it doesn’t rule it out either.

If you want to find out more, register here, and download the report. Scarier than the Horror Channel!

How ‘excellent’ is your Document Management Software?

If you haven’t nominated yourself for the Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award 2010, AIIM (news, site) has just announced that it is extending the closing date to February 10, so there’s still time.

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Tags: aiim, business process management, cloud computing, collaboration, data storage, document management, forrester, gartner, mcafee, security

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?