Businesses with 100 to 999 employees allocate a sizeable portion of their IT budgets to storage and security.Businesses with 100 to 999 employees continue to allocate a steady proportion
of their IT budgets to the areas of storage and security, driven by the need to
back up increasing stores of data and improve privacy, stability and security.
A study from AMI-Partners found that
midsize businesses will pour up to $7.8 billion into data storage and security
in 2008, up 12 percent from 2007. The rate is consistent with the previous
year, when midsize companies increased spending in these areas by 14 percent.
And the trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future—"as
long as medium-sized businesses see the need to guard against data loss and
threats to their internal databases and the volume of client data continues to
grow," said Nichelle McKenzie, one of the study's authors.
It also makes good business sense, McKenzie said. Not only did midsize
businesses pay an average of $7,000 each in that year to handle security
breaches or data losses, but 77 percent reported hard drive failures, 41
percent experienced a loss of portable or desktop PCs, and 36 percent reported
an incident of unauthorized PC or network use.
"Investing in security and storage hardware [and] software is seen as
both a proactive and reactive measure for medium businesses," McKenzie
said. "Why wait for something to happen?"
In the area of storage, in fact, the needs of midsize businesses are quite
distinct from those of small businesses and enterprises. For example, the
survey found that only 21 percent of small businesses felt that growth in e-mail
volume is a driver of storage investment, while 48 percent of midsize
businesses considered it a top driver.
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The study also found that midsize businesses in the United
States are investing heavily in software to
back up PCs and servers. Ninety percent of those businesses are buying backup
and recovery software, 33 percent are buying replication software and 29
percent are buying archiving software.
Although there are more sophisticated backup media available, 89 percent of
midsize businesses still use tape and back up their data on LAN
servers, the study found.
That's because companies of this size tend to stick with what has worked in
the past, McKenzie said. "And data backup for servers is relatively
inexpensive, and works effectively in storing data," she said.
About 5 percent of midsize businesses that use or plan to use storage
solutions and have a server plan to use an ISP or online Web hosting service
sometime this year, according to the study. Although the number is small,
"we do see a slight move to external storage solutions," McKenzie
said.
Although compliance often is seen as a bigger concern for larger companies,
regulatory compliance also is important to midsize companies. Forty percent of U.S.
midsize businesses reported compliance as a driver for storage expenditures,
while 33 percent reported compliance as a driver for security expenditures, the
study said.
On the security front, the vast majority—87 percent—of
midsize businesses today use a VPN, according to the study, with an additional
7 percent planning to implement a VPN in the coming months. In addition, 54
percent use encryption, 35 percent use security management and 55 percent use
some type of intrusion detection solution.
