Government Technology - November 2008 - (Page 32)

data management S TAT E | L O C A L | F E D E R A L j j Synopsis: Storage hardware is dirt cheap, but there are management costs associated with keeping all of that data. Agency: Alabama; Stanislaus County, Calif. Uncovered one are the days when an agency could store all of its data on a small server. Industry experts report that storage needs are increasing between 30 percent and 50 percent annually. This trend will only soar as the size of multimedia and other file types continues to explode. Fortunately as the demand for storage space rises, the cost of storage media declines. Samsung, for example, currently offers a 1-terabyte hard drive for less than $200. Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi offer comparable disks for similar prices. A standard 500 GB hard drive typically costs about $100. The prevailing thought used to be that there’s no such thing as having too much storage. So with the cost of storage dirtcheap these days, why isn’t the public sector jumping at the opportunity to store everything and anything? Jim Burns, CIO of Alabama, said cheap storage comes with its own problems. “It’s a bad idea to offer unlimited storage because management costs skyrocket and backup and retrieval becomes unmanageable,” Burns said. “Cost of storage media, such as disk, is a very small part of the overall costs associated with an enterprise storage solution. The industry agrees that disk is cheap, but for every dollar spent on disk, it takes about $5 to $7 to manage it.” BY LESLIE FRIESEN | CONTRIBUTING WRITER Hidden Costs Technologies: Disk storage, deduplication software. G As storage hardware costs drop, information management challenges grow. Infrastructure Costs The challenge isn’t storing massive amounts of data — the real problem lies in managing that data. IT experts and analysts point to a number of information-management issues facing government agencies: How is data secured, backed up and retrieved? How often are tape backups corrupted? How much staff time is spent on manual restores? How do you access and verify the data? Duplicate Data Duplicate data is a huge issue for the public and private sectors. For example, both human resources and payroll might utilize a particu- NOV_08 lar document at the same time, yet the legal requirements for data retention of that particular document may be vastly different based on the department and the governing entity. Even worse, individual users may keep multiple copies of a particular file, perhaps in various stages of development. These files are shared with other staff via e-mail, which in turn also automatically saves each version of the file. Before you know it, there can be 32 http://www.Govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - November 2008

Government Technology - November 2008 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for … Forward Thinkers Taking Tech Home Virtual Frontier Hidden Costs Uncovered Seeing Red For the Record In the Loop Benign Dictatorship Home-Field Advantage A Better Way to Park New Tools for Fighting Crime How It Works Spectrum Products Two Cents signal:noise

Government Technology - November 2008

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