A recent study by IDC on Expanding Digital Universe says that in 2006, 161 billion gigabytes were added to the digital universe. The findings further add that our planet is in the midst of a digital “Big Bang” that has implications for individuals, organisations, societies, and the global economy. The world is creating more information than it has the capability to store. Mammoth growth in information has spelled new storage challenges for the enterprises. Praveen Sahai, EMC, head-Marketing and Corporate Affairs in a chat with Biztech2 shares his concern about information growth and compliance requirements: Excerpts:

What are some of the new challenges for the storage industry?

The biggest challenge can be identified as information growth. Most of the information growth is coming from individuals; it’s not the corporate data. So in the near future we see that 70% of worldwide information will be created by individuals and 85% of this data will become corporate responsibility. Compliance requirement is another major concern for the enterprises. We need to be aware about laws like Indian IT Act, Indian Evidence Act and Sebi clause 49.

Do you think there is enough awareness among CIOs about the Indian laws?

Definitely there is more information which needs to be shared with CIOs and IT community, so that they become aware about local laws and abide by it.

In terms of CIO priorities, where does storage figure?

Definitely it is among the top three things. Majority of CIOs are worried about the data growth. As business is growing for every body in India, large amount of time and money is spend in managing storage environment or information infrastructure environment.

What are a CIO's pain points with regards to managing storage?

Data growth is their biggest concern. They are spending more and more in buying hardware devices. Virtualisation is one of the tools which we recommend to our customers to meet their growing storage requirements. Virtualisation helps in using your environment in a much better way. There is no sense in buying more and more storage boxes. There is a need to consolidate their application, storage infrastructure and utilise it in the best possible way.

What percentage of the overall IT budget goes in to managing storage?

We don’t have specific calculation but storage comprises approximately 15 to 20% of overall IT budget. The storage requirements are growing rapidly. Storage is taking a different dimension of information infrastructure. It is not just about piece of hardware in your data centre, it is about how you are able to protect that information and how do you leverage it for business benefit. So the 15 to 20% share will grow to 30 to 40% as and when people start looking at storage from an information infrastructure standpoint as against storage only stand point.

How has the proliferation of unstructured data impacted the overall storage mechanism?

There is large amount of unstructured data available in our corporate environments today. When we talk to a customer, we tell them that business critical data should not be left unstructured. It should take the form of an application or business critical aspect for the corporate. In last three years, EMC has acquired some 30 companies. We have acquired software tools and companies which develop tools to convert the unstructured data to structured formats.

A CIO needs to assess his environment to find out where this unstructured data is lying and what part of this unstructured data is business critical. There are multiple solutions available in the world as well as at EMC to overcome the problem of unstructured data.