Instead, it is really about safeguarding their information and making it readily available to them without interruptions. And for these reasons, a storage policy must exist. To date, corporate America hasn't widely used corporate storage or IT storage policies. Some analysts agree that a lot of companies haven't thought much about managing storage, just adding, without any definitive metrics, to where it was thought to be needed. Farid Neema, a storage consultant with Peripheral Concepts, Santa Barbara, California, says, this attitude is changing.
Companies now realize that employees abuse storage space if no one is paying attention to it.
At Houghton Mifflin, a corporate mandate to keep spending down put pressure on the IT department to stay within a certain margin of its budget for 1999. And keeping a lid on storage costs put additional pressure on how well the IT department would achieve its goal. Mooney says that 10 percent of all corporate spending goes for storage - everything from buying equipment to maintaining it. The IT department faced still another challenge - storage requirements were doubling every year. Meanwhile, some administrators had reported that several Lotus Notes servers had reached 95 percent capacity and could experience an outage if filled beyond this level.