Report: Most U.S. Companies Say Data Infrastructure Falling Short

Nearly 60 percent of U.S. companies are overwhelmed by the amount of data they manage and 76 percent are concerned their current infrastructure will be unable to scale to meet upcoming demands. That’s according to a new survey from Hitachi Vantara, the modern infrastructure, data management, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. 

New and exciting data-intensive technologies and applications like generative AI are spurring a goldrush to greater insights, automation, and predictability, but these technologies are simultaneously exacerbating the already-strained infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments on which they run.

Key Findings

Hitachi Vantara conducted a global survey of 1,288 C-level executives and IT decision makers, including 308 in the United States, to quantify the extent to which organizations are struggling to manage their data infrastructure in a secure and sustainable way. Its newly published Modern Data Infrastructure Dynamics Report reveals that most companies expect their data needs to nearly double in the next two years, and that both protecting and managing that rapid growth of data in an actionable and sustainable way are further complicating efforts.

Key U.S. findings include:

• Respondents say that data is their most valuable asset but are concerned about the security and resilience of their data infrastructure; 71 percent are concerned they cannot detect a data breach in time to protect data.
• 65 percent of respondents are concerned over whether their organization’s data infrastructure is resilient enough to recover data from ransomware attacks.
• 27 percent of respondents admitted that important data was not backed up and 35 percent had experienced data inaccessibility due to storage outages.
• 66 percent of IT leaders currently measure their data center’s energy consumption; however, 32 percent acknowledged that their data infrastructure uses too much energy and nearly half admitted their sustainability policies don’t address the impact of storing unused data.

The study also shed light on the future of data storage, with data spread across the hybrid cloud model leveraging a mix of public/private cloud, co-location and on premises expected to persist. For U.S. business leaders, the study found data stored in an already established hybrid cloud with percentages of data center workloads located almost evenly between the public cloud (24 percent), private cloud (25 percent), on premises (25 percent), and co-located/managed services (22 percent). Notably, the percentages were expected to largely stay the same in the coming two years. Download the full report here. 

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