Data deluge will pressure firms to up spend on security

Despite the global financial meltdown which is forcing firms to take a relook on their budget outlay, Indian CIOs are open to increase their spend on information management to interface with customers and increase customer loyalty.

According to an IDG Mindtrack survey, with a deluge of digital data, most of which unstructured format, majority of the India companies participated in the survey are planning to increase their security budgets in the range of 10-30 per cent to secure their critical business relevant information.

“A majority of CIOs participated in the survey are firmly convinced that enterprise-wide information management strategy is important, if not critical, for the success of their businesses. In a bid to understand and get an unbiased assessment of their security credentials, a large majority of those surveyed will be outsourcing their risk assessment and security audit functions to a trusted technology partner,” the survey said.

A 2008 report by IDC had forecasted a 10-fold increase in the digital universe (information) from 180 exabytes (1 billion gigabyte is equal to 1 exabytes) to 1,800 exabytes in 2011. The report stated the digital universe is growing rapidly due to the accelerated growth in the use of digital camera, Web 2.0 technologies, SMS, streaming multimedia and some other sources of digital information.

The Mindtrack survey found that close to 80 per cent of the data generated within organisations is either partially or completely unstructured with only a fraction of the employees having complete access to structured data. The increase in the unstructured data coupled with the shortage of storage space is driving companies to invest in storage virtualisation, information lifecycle management and back-up.