Half of UK businesses say their IT storage lacks critical performance

The survey also found that 53 per cent of businesses are considering moving applications to the cloud this year and nearly a third (30 percent) are considering purchasing new IT storage in 2018 to help deal with their current lack of storage capacity and performance.

Matt Beale, Storage Solutions Specialist, Ultima, says: “Businesses are missing a trick when it comes to improving their IT storage. Many are under the illusion that cloud storage is cheap, but it isn’t necessarily, so companies need to think about managing their data better as well as the systems they put it on. For example, it’s commonly stated that backups need to be kept for five or seven years. Why? Often the response is: “Finance say that we need to keep seven years of records”. That’s fine, but if you look into your finance system I can almost guarantee that you have at least seven years of records in your production system. So why are you keeping seven year old backups? All they are doing is costing you money.”

“What companies need to do is take a step back and look at their business goals and subsequently what data they need to meet those goals. Using this approach it’s simpler to find a storage solution that will work in the long-run for your business. Some companies will need to store critical data on-premise as well as some in the cloud, but we are moving towards the utopia where all storage and data can be managed from a single point,” says Beale.