Dreaming of storage, security and downtime

More than half of European IT directors expect further redundancies at their company this year, and two thirds admit to lying awake at night worrying about security or downtime.

A survey sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) also revealed that half of European IT heads are aware that they will have to change the direction of their IT strategy in the next two years.

Three quarters of UK respondents anticipated that their storage capacity requirements would increase over the next 12 months.

But only 30 per cent indicated that they would allocate a larger percentage of their IT budget to storage in 2003.

Currently, the majority of respondents claim to spend no more than 10 per cent of their total IT budget on storage.

John Taffinder, executive vice president at HDS, said the survey showed that, although storage is a core requirement of any IT system, it had become a "point of pain" rather than a fulfilled need that allowed companies to focus on key business issues.

And although HDS hopes that open standards led by the Storage Networking Industry Association will be developed within the next two years, less than a third of the 570 survey respondents agreed.

Analyst Gartner Dataquest has estimated that European organisations spend €5bn (£3.42bn) on storage every year.