Firms are spending more on data protection as the importance of information to their success continues to grow.
Data protection and recovery software were among the quickest growing sectors in the worldwide market for storage software.
That is according to new research from IDC, which indicates that data protection enjoyed growth of 2.4 per cent in software revenues, while the segment for data recovery grew by 2.2 per cent, as businesses continue to invest in ensuring the protection of their mission-critical information.
While data recovery software offers businesses an important means of restoring lost or damaged data following an incident, it is always prudent to have a protection strategy in place, so as to mitigate the risk of lost data in the first place.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is by investing in offsite and online backup, which will allow you to maintain access to important files if your local servers fail.
This will not only allow the business to carry on operating following a hardware failure, but will also minimise the downtime that can be so costly for firms carrying out the majority of their operations online.
According to the IDC research, companies with more than 1,000 employees made up the largest component of the market for storage software investments, but that doesn’t mean this is something that smaller companies can afford to overlook.
In fact, the survey indicated that spending in this area by small and medium-sized enterprises has grown by 5.2 per cent in the past year to a global total of $574 million (£358 million).
Eric Sheppherd, research director of storage software at IDC, said that the results of the survey were mixed when viewed by segment.
"Most functional markets showed increased investments, but the increases were far smaller than the market had been experiencing over the past two years," he said. "These generally lower results can be partially attributed to the suppressed economic growth in Europe."
But with so much riding these days on the quality and availability of a company’s data and documents, protecting important information is one area where no firm should be scrimping.