It’s no secret that today’s organizations are awash with data. Data is streaming into transaction systems, appliances and devices from a wide variety of applications, and new sources including social media. Proponents of Big Data state that data contains veins rich with information for decision makers and the business, and many organizations have made it a priority to capture and use this data. However, what many organizations are also discovering is that managing and storing this all this data has a cost. While there is a drive across the industry to introduce new and more digitally compact forms of data storage, as well as cloud storage, these solutions do not get to the heart of the problem for enterprises—data needs to be managed more effectively, and tied closer to the business, from the start.
Key highlights and findings from the survey, which explore database growth challenges and solutions, include the following:
- What’s keeping data managers up at night? Increases in data variety, concerns about database performance, and the need to control data management costs are the key challenges arising from data growth. To deal with these issues, most respondents are focusing on ramping up database performance and consolidation efforts.
- Fueling today’s rapid data growth—in many cases, exceeding 25% a year—is rising business demand at respondents’ organizations. A multiplier adding to this growth is data duplication across organizations for various purposes. In most cases, data is duplicated three or more times.
- Another driver of the data explosion is the fact that it’s getting more difficult to dispose of data. Forty percent of respondents retain data well beyond the seven-year legal requirement in order to meet compliance mandates as well as maintain data in the event of litigation. More of this data is kept online for easy access, despite the additional resources and costs incurred.
- A large number of companies still attempt to manage data growth through hardware acquisition and provisioning, versus more advanced and efficient approaches such as tiered storage or data lifecycle management. A majority of enterprises rely on tape for backup and archiving.Most are now also seeking more automated approaches to better manage growing data volumes.
ACHIEVING ENTERPRISE DATA PERFORMANCE: 2013 IOUG Database Growth Survey was produced by Unisphere Research in partnership with the Independent Oracle Users Group, and sponsored by Oracle.