The growth in data that they will have to deal with comes from several areas:

• The natural increase of the amount of data required for business continuance and expansion of current operations. This data represents the normal business requirements.

• New applications or business opportunities. While this is a positive indicator for the business, it represents a potentially significant increase in the amount of data under management.

• The machine-to-machine data from pervasive computing generates an overwhelming amount of data that most IT people have not had to deal with before. The data is used for “big data” analytics or business intelligence, and it will be left to IT to manage for the data scientists.

The problem is really one of scale. Because operational expenses typically are not scaled properly to address the management required for that amount of data, there is insufficient budget to handle the onslaught of data.

Storage professionals are looking at different approaches to address the increased demands. These include more efficient storage systems. Greater capacity efficiently – making better use of capacity – is a big help. So are storage systems that support consolidation of workloads onto one platform.

Data protection is a continuing problem. The process is viewed as a necessary requirement but not as a revenue-enhancing area. Consequently, data protection needs are dramatic but often lack the financial investment to accommodate the capacity increases. This means storage pros must either find products that can be more effective while fitting within the financial constraints or re-examining the entire data protection strategy by using technologies such as automated, policy-controlled archiving and data reduction.

Exploiting point-in-time (snapshot) copies on storage platforms for immediate retrieval demands, implementing backup to disk, and reducing the schedule for backups on removable media to monthly or less frequently are considerations for stretching backup budgets.

Storage professionals need to be open to new ideas for dealing with the massive influx of data. Without addressing the greatly increasing capacity demand, managed storage becomes an oxymoron.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

IDC forecasts that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created and replicated this year – enough to fill 200 billion two-hour high-definition movies, 57.5 billion 32GB Apple iPads or the amount of storage required for 215 million high-resolution MRI scans per person per day.

In other words, a really lot of data, and it’s doubling every two years according to IDC’s numbers. And metadata is growing twice as fast as the digital universe.

Looking farther out, IDC forecasts that by 2020 IT departments will have 10 times as many virtual and physical servers, 50 times as much information, and 75 times the number of files or containers that encapsulate information than they do today.

And there will be 1.5 times the number of IT professionals to manage it all.

As you would expect, EMC global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis hit on the “big data” theme in discussing the results, but also suggested the findings could serve as a wakeup call to change the way people manage data.

“I would use this as evidence to go to senior management and say ‘We need a new game plan here,’” Hollis said. “Simply expanding five percent year-over-year on storage costs, taking the machines they have and tuning them up – that’s not going to keep up. I meet a lot of storage people who think they’re like the people with their fingers in the dikes, the water keeps coming and they’re running out of fingers and toes. Maybe it’s time to think about this problem differently.”

Hollis said “a lot of people are looking at this as an opportunity instead of a problem,” and those people are what EMC refers to as the “big data crowd.” They consist largely of media and entertainment companies and researchers who use data to make money for their employers.

“There are actually two kinds of IT organizations we see often in a big company,” Hollis said. “One is the traditional IT guys who deal with shared services, e-mail, Oracle and things like that. The big data crowd is usually a separate IT structure, usually researchers or business guys who have an idea and they handcraft the environment in such as way that makes the money or provides the value they want. The technology is different, the organization is different, and the thinking is different. At what point does this big data IT start looking like mainstream IT? Certainly not this year, but if this data growth keeps going, in three or four years it will be a lot more complex.”

IDC group vice president for storage Dave Reinsel said data growth is fueled partly by the low cost of disk. But he agrees with Hollis that organizations need to take a different look at how they deal with the data.

“We’ve made it dirt cheap to store,” he said. “If costs were going up like gasoline, people might change their behavior. But storage cost per gig is going down every year, so people have more. But data centers aren’t cheap to run. You have to justify building another data center. We’re getting to the point where we need to enable companies to extract the value out of that information.”

So far, Reinsel said, cloud storage isn’t playing much of a role in storing that information. Today, all cloud computing accounts for less than 2% of IT spending.

“Only 20% of information will be touching the public cloud by 2015,” Reinsel said. “People aren’t just jumping to public clouds. Hybrid clouds are out there and social networks are driving growth to public clouds, but there are still security concerns.”