Cohesity Survey Reveals Widespread Lack of Visibility Into Enterprise Data Storage

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 1, 2015) - Cohesity, the pioneer of converged secondary storage, today announced the results of a survey that highlight the growing complexity of enterprise data storage -- along with widespread lack of visibility into stored data. The survey reveals that most companies rely on three or more storage solutions to manage company data, and in turn respondents rated "managing complexity of different products" as a top concern, second only to growing storage costs.

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The results of the survey underscore the urgent need for a unified storage solution that provides a clear view of data type, access, usage, copies, and other important metrics for company data. For example, only 28 percent of respondents state they have a good understanding of which users are accessing company data, while more than 60 percent say they don't have good information about how many copies of data exist.

At the same time, nearly half of respondents note that data has grown more than 50 percent in just the past year, which translates to doubling the amount of storage needed every two years or less. The exponential growth in storage requirements paired with the lack of insight into basic copy data metrics show how important it will be for many companies to adopt better data management solutions soon.

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"This survey highlights an alarming trend for many companies in which data continues to grow across multiple storage solutions while basic metrics like the number of data copies being stored become more difficult to access," said Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron. "These businesses need a single, highly scalable storage solution that addresses these issues head-on by reducing complexity and providing better visibility into their data."

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Tribune Media, a worldwide, publicly-traded media company, turned to Cohesity to help manage a store of data that is doubling annually.

"Cohesity offers an intelligent and efficient secondary storage solution that empowers enterprises to overcome the problems associated with today's fragmented storage landscape," said Tribune Media Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer David Giambruno. "By converging analytics, data protection, archiving, and DevOps on a single, scalable platform with built-in copy data management and public cloud integration, Cohesity has helped us take a smarter, more efficient approach to data management."

On the whole, the survey shows most respondents lack insight into key information about their data, such as how many data copies their company holds and which are the most accessed. Insight into types of files, capacity utilization trends, and the amount of data being protected are the only metrics available to a majority of respondents, but none of these majorities rose above 66 percent, showing how even basic insight into data is not widespread. The survey includes responses from 74 IT professionals across diverse industries including financial services, healthcare, technology, insurance, and higher education.

Key findings:

• 53 percent of companies currently use three or more separate data storage solutions.
• 42 percent data of respondents reported that the amount of data they store has grown more than 50 percent over the past year.
• 61 percent of respondents did not have a good understanding of the number of copies of data stored across the organization.
• The two greatest storage challenges for IT professionals is the costs associated with explosive data growth and the complexity of managing different storage products, cited by 54 and 43 percent of survey respondents, respectively.

Cohesity was recently listed in the 2015 Gartner Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies report as a sample vendor in the "emerging" copy data management category, which has a "high" benefit rating in the report.

"IT should look at copy data management as part of a backup modernization effort or when managing multiple application copies for testing/ development has become costly, overwhelming or a bottleneck," the report¹ stated. "Copy data management could also be useful for organizations that are looking for active access to secondary data sources for reporting or analytics due to its separation from the production environment."

Cohesity will also be a sponsor at the upcoming VMworld 2015 Conference taking place in San Francisco from August 30 to September 3. Visit the Cohesity team at Booth #428 to learn more, and tweet @cohesity about your #storagepains to enter to win an escape to Hawaii.

About Cohesity
Cohesity's mission is to enable companies of all sizes to bring order to their data chaos. Its intelligent data platform converges secondary storage workflows to transform disparate silos of data into business insight. Started by Mohit Aron, the pioneer of hyper-convergence, Cohesity takes aim at the inefficient, fractured landscape of secondary storage for data protection, development and analytics by applying a distributed, web-scale architecture to break down these data silos. Its solution converges all secondary storage workflows onto an intelligent, infinitely scalable data platform so customers can store and protect data seamlessly, use it efficiently, and learn from it instantly. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and is backed by leading venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, ARTIS Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and Trinity Ventures. For more information, visit www.cohesity.com.

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¹ Gartner Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2015, Pushan Rinnen, Santhosh Rao, July 13, 2015