In 1979, Tandy Corporation unveiled its TRS-80 Model II, touting the boxy computer as the ideal solution for small businesses.
The TRS-80 sported storage space expandable to almost 2 million bytes. And if that wasn’t enough, there were eight-inch floppy disks capable of storing a whopping 500 kilobytes.
Fast-forward a little more than two decades.
The palm-sized iPod Nano holds 16 billion times more data than the TRS-80 Model II. Small-business computers rarely come without gigabytes upon gigabytes of storage, plus a terabyte of backup on a distant cloud somewhere and another terabyte for a backup of the backup—just in case.
Walmart’s transaction databases alone now are a staggering 2.5 petabytes. Each week, Facebook users upload 25 trillion terabytes of photos of themselves in the bathroom mirror and “I’m bored” status updates. And by 2013, the amount of traffic flowing over the Internet annually is predicted to reach 667 exabytes.
The problem with all that data—whether it’s those annoying conspiracy theory e-mails sent to 50 people we barely know or our medical records at the hospital—is that we rarely, if ever, hit the delete button. And we’re rapidly heading for data overload.
The average company doubles its data every 18 to 22 months, a 60% year-over-year growth rate. Last year, computer hardware firms shipped out 88 exabytes of new devices to store it all.
“That’s a staggering amount of storage space, and if growth trends hold, you’ll have 60% more than that shipped out in 2011,” says Brian Vandegrift, vice president of sales for Venyu, a data protection, recovery and availability firm. “Data is growing faster than we can build hard drives to store it all. It’s a problem that grows exponentially.”
So what’s driving the demand?
In addition to the new digital records companies create every day, many businesses also are scanning their archived paperwork to become fully digitized. That can mean years’ worth of documents, each one requiring bytes of storage space that can eventually add up to terabytes.
Then there’s the kind of data that’s being stored. Hospitals have gone all digital on diagnostic scans like MRIs, mammograms and X-rays, and those massive documents require equally massive storage space. Engineers and architects now digitally draft blueprints and renderings. Even our personal digital cameras take pictures that are several megabytes in size.
Add to that a very real fear of deleting something that might be needed a month or a year down the road—that one e-mail that could prove a company’s innocence in a civil lawsuit, or financial records that might suddenly be in demand from a government regulator.
Vandegrift says some firms don’t truly know what they’re supposed to keep or how long they’re supposed to keep it, so they keep everything forever.
“Nobody deletes anything anymore because you just don’t know when you’re going to need something,” he says. “We live in a very litigious society, so we’re paranoid to hit the delete button. Companies are also being driven to store more data by a lot of the compliance regulations. All of these things require you to keep, store and back up more data.”
Managing all that data can become a nightmare. The vast majority of business owners can’t afford an information technology staff, which means there’s often no one assigned to determine what gets stored and backed up, and how often.
General Informatics CEO Mohit “Mo” Vij says cleaning up massive amounts of data manually is practically impossible today, so data storage becomes a matter of simple economics.
“It’s a matter of the cost of organizing the information versus the cost of storage. That’s the key point here,” he says. “Small businesses can’t afford a large IT staff to manage what data is saved and what gets discarded. The solution is to just buy more and more storage.”
But even with a save-it-all strategy, companies aren’t necessarily protecting themselves from equipment failure or natural disaster. Backup programs can be complicated for the uninitiated, and transfer times can sometimes take days. If the program doesn’t offer automatic notification that files haven’t been updated recently, business owners might not discover until the disaster hits that they’re three months out of date.
Gulf States Computer owner J.P. Villaume says many companies aren’t investing in proper backup procedures because the economy is tight; in some cases, even if they are they’re not even sure if the system is set up properly.
“We walk into a lot of new client accounts, and they’re like, ‘I’m not even sure what I’m backing up.’ That’s scary,” he says. “If you don’t have an IT staff or someone to keep up with it, it’s a problem. You can’t just keep putting it off until next week.”
The ever-increasing need to store more and more bytes and terabytes of information can put a strain on businesses in other ways.
Backup drives require a significant amount of power and create heat, so not only does a business have more power usage in its server room, but it also may require more air-conditioning infrastructure to cool the equipment, which in turn also requires more power.
“It isn’t just the cost of the equipment, but [also] the maintenance, the operation, the electricity and the air-conditioning cost, and that can be huge,” Vandegrift says. “That doesn’t even address the fact that many people are strapped for space in their business; and if you have to keep adding these devices, you’re eating more space you can’t use for another revenue-producing employee. It’s compounding itself as companies really have to face this problem, and you can’t ignore it, because it just gets bigger year after year.”
Vij and Vandegrift agree the key to getting a handle on the mountain of data storage is automation.
The problem, they are quick to add, is that a reliable application built to know when data can be deleted and when it can’t just doesn’t exist. “Until that happens,” Vandegrift says, “we’re not going to get a handle on this thing.”
Off-site storage services have become increasingly user-friendly, making it easier for novices to manually manage their data.
Existing document management software can help eliminate duplicate files—cutting down on the need for new storage—and archive lesser-used files to enable quicker access to those more frequently accessed, among other functions.
Later this fall, Microsoft is expected to release Windows 8—the next version of its operating system—with an overhaul to its file management system. It also features File History, a new file backup and restore feature that allows users to save and maintain different versions of files.
Vij says software is on the way that will even automate the process of selecting the best photograph by scanning them for things like closed eyes and blurriness, then suggest action to eliminate unneeded versions to save space on the hard drive.
Until reliable automation arrives, Villaume suggests business owners have an effective daily, weekly or monthly data storage strategy to make sure they’re covered. “It’s all about having a game plan,” he says.
