18 Nov 2008

By Paul Travis
November 17, 2008

Restrictions on IT budgets and staffing are causing more companies to consider online backup, archiving, and replication services

The growth in online storage services will outpace conventional storage architectures for the next several years, fueled in part by the inability of IT departments to gain larger budgets or more personnel, according to a new report on storage as a service (SaaS) by research firm IDC .

IDC says SaaS capacity will grow from 174 petabytes in 2007 to more than 2.1 exabytes in 2012, a growth rate that will beat the sales growth of conventional storage technologies. Still, companies will continue to buy disks and tapes; IDC predicts the growth of hard-disk drives will continue at better than 50 percent annually.

But the continued growth in the amount of data that is being created and the longer periods of time that organizations and consumers want to retain that data will fuel a boom in online storage services for backup, archiving, and replication, Brad Nisbet, program manager for storage and data management services at IDC, told Byte and Switch. The current economic woes are a contributing factor as companies look for ways to cut costs.

IDC surveyed 812 firms and found that 59 percent of small businesses are …

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