Businesses in Asia are increasingly aware of the need to manage their growing data and are making the effort to do so, according to storage and software vendor EMC.
Ron Goh, EMC's president for South Asia, told ZDNet Asia Friday that large enterprises in the region, particularly from industries such as finance, telecommunications and healthcare are "very aware" of the data explosion phenomenon and are taking steps to address the issue.
Findings of an EMC-commissioned study released last month indicate that digital data will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent between 2006 and 2010, to reach 1.8 zettabytes or 1,800 billion gigabytes. According to the study, the estimated data volume will exceed the total available storage space by nearly 50 percent.
In Singapore alone, the amount of digital information created this year is expected to be over 1,200 terabytes, according to EMC.
Enterprises in Singapore, noted Goh, are looking at "many more" terabytes of storage. "Just about every major company has insufficient [storage] capacity," he added.
Even as data volumes climb, large organizations across the region including those in emerging markets such as Indonesia and Vietnam, are more conscious of improving their storage management, said Goh. They actively seek out vendors to understand best practices and as a result often take less time to develop their capabilities compared to early adopters in other regions.
In addition, the larger businesses in Asia are increasingly opting to site their backup facilities in different countries, observed Goh. Indonesia, for instance, is prone to earthquakes and companies located there are inclined to lower their enterprise risk by moving their backup data centers to nearby countries such as Singapore.
While larger enterprises are generally more proactive, smaller businesses and consumers are not yet experiencing the storage crunch and therefore less likely to worry about the issue, said Goh. This requires the company to tweak its messages in order to drive home the message to this particular segment, which is a "growth engine" for EMC and one of the focus areas going forward.
Earlier this week, EMC signaled its intention to target home users and SMBs with its announcement to acquire Iomega, a storage and hard drive provider for consumers and smaller businesses.
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