Most IT organizations are not equipped to handle periods of intense data flow, despite the majority saying they know they are coming in the next year. More than half have already experienced productivity losses as a result of data overload at critical business junctures, and 25 percent willingly share specific stories of how poor data performance has hurt their business. As a result, most will add significant network storage capacity this year to keep up.

These are among the findings of a new study called Uptime @ Crunch Time - Valuing the Need for Data Speed at Critical Business Inflections, conducted by the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum and sponsored by BlueArc, a leading high-performance network storage provider. The study assesses the importance of data performance to business success and the impact of downtime during peak periods of massive information processing. The findings reflect responses from more than 125 IT professionals in an online survey completed in the first quarter of 2008, in conjunction with dialogs with several enterprise IT executives.
According to the study findings:

1. More than a third said chances are good they will experience a significant spike in data volumes and user demand over the next year.
2. Fifty-six percent are not prepared or only somewhat prepared to handle the onslaught.
3. Seventy-eight percent are not fully prepared to address any single spike of data that is over 10 times their average daily processing volumes.
4. Eighty percent said storage performance and data access by employees, partners and customers are important to their business.
5. Nearly two-thirds plan to implement or expand network storage over the next year, and more than a third will experience a growth in storage needs of at least 50 percent in the next two years.

"We are encouraged to see that IT professionals recognize forces and factors driving the need for more capacity in the short term as well as the linkage between data performance and business success," said Derek Kober, Director of the BPM Forum. "The disturbing part is that so many companies are behind the eight ball in their preparedness for the looming threat of spikes and application demands."

Performance Equals Business
Respondents from the survey point out the direct correlation between data performance and their ability to speed time-to-market and time-to-revenue as well as avoid costly disasters. In fact, 83 percent said that implementing storage systems that could reduce processing time of critical business applications in half would lead to an increase in revenues.

"As more businesses and industries realize that system performance is key to business success, the demand for higher IOPS, better throughput and greater capacity will continue to grow," said Steve Daheb, BlueArc senior vice president of marketing and business development.

"This survey shows that not only are organizations planning upgrades to support additional growth, but also to avoid costly downtime during data surges they know are coming."

A majority of organizations have already experienced productivity losses due to information overload. Stories ranged from the loss of weeks worth of data to lost revenue due to claims processing delays to product design data being compromised. And even short-term glitches of one day can be catastrophic to business, said 55 percent of respondents.

Data Demand Drivers
A wide variety of strategic applications are driving the need for better data storage performance in the organization. Top applications cited by respondents included rich media files and applications, ERP, email and messaging, research, product development, and web traffic. And emerging IT pressures are weighing heavily on the need for better performance, including new application support, archiving and compliance, and web-based services.

Source: BlueArc Corp.