For IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

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	March 6, 2006 Storage Service Providers Rise From The Ashes Firms Will Outsource Undifferentiated Storage Tasks To Stay Competitive by Stephanie Balaouras with Laura Koetzle, Sarah Bernhardt

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Executive Summary

Today, a number of pressures are fueling renewed interest in storage outsourcing and third-party storage hosting. With IT budgets and staffing levels that are stagnant or slow-growing, most IT departments are struggling to acquire, manage, and protect massive storage infrastructures while responding to new business demands. Therefore, they are once again considering outsourced storage as an alternative. Outsourcing storage can relieve the pressures burdening IT departments, but firms must identify the undifferentiated storage tasks suitable for outsourcing and develop criteria for selecting a service provider. A host of storage service providers ranging from large system vendors to niche providers have re-emerged to meet this demand with standardized storage service offerings for remote management, backup, replication, and archiving. Given that there is no clear leader in this marketplace today, each provider has an opportunity stake out a dominant position by building out offerings in key areas with straightforward, pay-per-capacity pricing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• The Storage Service Provider Market Grows Explosively, Then Flames Out
• Enterprises Must Meet Increasing Storage Demands With Flat IT Budgets
• Storage Service Providers Re-Emerge
• What Services Do SSPs Provide?
• SSPs Range From System Vendors To Niche Providers

RECOMMENDATIONS

• CIOs: Outsource Undifferentiated Storage Operations
• How To Select A Storage Service Provider

WHAT IT MEANS

• The SSP Market Will Grow Steadily But Won't Displace Internal Deployments
• Supplemental Material
• Related Research Documents

This is an excerpt