The data that enterprises are acquiring, managing, and storing is growing exponentially mainly due to unstructured data – emails, spreadsheets, text, graphics, video, audio – to ensure compliance, improve productivity, and create new revenue. These data streams are exploding at an estimated annual growth rate of 80 percent as per Gartner’s IT Market Clock for Storage from 2011. IDC also expects the amount of storage capacity deployed to store the explosion of new content will increase sixfold in the next three years (stated in a 2012), exacerbating the challenges around data management, protection, and preservation.

 I really identified with this issue like many of our clients in the SMB space. How can SMBs bridge the gap between Enterprise-class requirements and SMB budget constraints?

IT professionals who work at organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees face a unique storage challenge. Their environment has grown to a size that requires the features and performance of enterprise-class systems, but they have a budget that is barely above the cost of starter SANs that are designed for much smaller businesses. 

The explosive growth in the amount of data created in the world continues to accelerate and surprise us in terms of sheer volume. Data explosion is one of the biggest challenges facing companies of all sizes and is being tagged as one of the biggest worries across the world in 2013, while increasing cost of storage will be another concern.