So what according to you is the most important business asset? DATA? Bingo! The business data in your company is your most valuable resource, as data availability at the right time, place, and to the right person can make or break your business.

The responsibility for storing and managing enterprise data is a major cause of insomnia among IT managers. The continuous explosion of data means they need to keep scaling up their already expensive infrastructure, as well as administrative manpower to handle it. To make matters worse, the storage technologies change rapidly and keep getting more complex, which increases the danger of getting trapped with an outdated, incompatible or simply wrong infrastructure. Thankfully there are specialized organizations that will run the show for the hapless IT manager. All that is needed is a change in perspective—to think of storage as a utility, rather than an asset. Specialized storage service providers (SSP) provide storage management on demand. Their solution is simple—‘outsource your data storage to us’.

The beginning
The SSP model began and flourished during the dotcom boom in the US. The initial offer from them was incredible, they wanted enterprises to rent storage space from their own, sophisticated infrastructure housed in a data center. An IDC report in 2001 said the storage utility market in the US grew sharply to $139 million that year from a mere $11 million in 1999—and could mushroom to $5.6 billion by 2004. Among the many business models used by SSPs, one model allowed companies to rent space for anything between $20-$70 per gigabyte per month, depending upon the size and importance of data, and how frequently you need back ups and so on. However, this pay-as-you-use model, as was only proved later, didn’t work for something as valuable as enterprise data. SSPs never took into account that companies would be far less willing to let their invaluable corporate data travel outside their area of control. As the market began getting crowded with an ever-increasing number of players, the real crash came in the form of the dotcom bust. Suddenly SSPs were relieved of their biggest client base, and the traditional enterprises were wary of letting others manage their data.

The new order
Lack of business forced many SSPs to simply shut shop, while others began tweaking their business model. Outsourcing of primary storage became less popular, while SSPs started focusing more on providing storage management services, especially data replication, backup and restoration and disaster recovery solutions.

Offering primary storage space on rent is an idea that is yet to break any ground in India, yet there are a few service providers like NetMagic Solutions who offer managed primary storage services. But "it is the Internet or Intranet related data which is usually stored at the SP’s site", says Shriranga Mulay, manager operations at NetMagic Solutions. Mulay says a data center can offer cost savings to customers, as it is able to divide fixed infrastructure costs like redundant bandwidth, power, and security etc among many customers.

Enterprises can also co-locate their storage infrastructure with an SSP or a data center. Depending upon the contract, the SSP may be asked to manage the storage infrastructure end-to-end, giving guaranteed service and uptime to the enterprise.

"The security aspect is well taken care of", says Mulay, "even though I have physical access to the servers, security can be implemented where I cannot access the actual database."

The types of services demanded may also have something to do with the size of an enterprise. Large companies are usually more sensitive about their data and therefore less open to the idea of storing their core-data outside their bounds. The small enterprises usually have little or no IT infrastructure, and therefore they are far open to the idea of outsourcing their storage management. It’s actually a question of mindset, as "the trend so far is limited to only a few mature enterprises", says T Srinivasan, country manager at EMC India. P P Subramanian, country manger, Hitachi Data Systems India also agrees that outsourcing of critical business information is a sensitive issue. Avijit Basu, marketing manager, network storage solutions at HP India says, "A lot of enterprises will prefer to keep their core data in-house, but would prefer outsourcing their disaster recovery and business continuity requirements to SSPs." However, it is the managed services that are proving to be a top draw among enterprises, as services like backup and restoration, data replication and even disaster recovery support are being actively sought from SSPs. The Internet data centers like that of Sify, NetMagic etc provide this new model of storage services.

The last word
The latest business mantra is to outsource everything that is non-core to your organization. Given that data storage is a very sensitive resource for most enterprises, outsourcing any aspect related to it calls for a careful and well-thought decision.

Choosing the right outsourcing model, and the right service provider can actually work for most enterprises. It also depends on the industry the business is in, companies in telecom and finance sector usually generate huge volumes of data, and outsourcing some aspects of the their data storage becomes more of a forced necessity.

TEAM DQ