Data tools

I was intrigued by a news report on the MicroScope web site concerning research by hard drive specialist Buffalo Technology that found a lot of small businesses in the UK were very happy to use consumer storage devices to hold their business data.

I’m not going to get on my ‘don’t call me a consumer’ hobby-horse again but for the purposes of this article I’m going to use the word ‘home’ or ‘personal’ instead of the dreaded c-word. Anyway, the reason why I’m focusing on this report is that I’m fairly certain a survey of Irish SMBs would return very similar results.

According to the survey, 62% of small businesses were happy to backup data to what I assume are external hard drives designed (or priced?) for use in the home. As if that wasn’t shocking enough, 45% of them had no problems backing up their information to a USB stick or CD. Only a measly 10% said they used a NAS device.

 

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Needless to say, Buffalo Technology was not impressed. Sales director Paul Hudson said that while IT managers realised the importance of data storage, they needed "guidance on the risks involved with using simple storage devices that are designed for c____ use but don’t cut it when it comes to daily mass storage business use".

He does have a point-up to a point. Aside from fears that the devices could be lost or damaged, there is also a very real concern they might not be able to provide the redundancy features that products designed for the enterprise can. But, then again, as the old adage goes "you pays your money and you takes your choice" and for many SMBs, any choice between home/personal products and enterprise comes down resoundingly in favour of the former. Why? I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head. Price, obviously. Convenience. Simplicity.

Many small businesses just don’t have the resources to splash out on enterprise-level storage products and a lot of them probably don’t think they need them either. True, a lot of SMBs don’t like being condescended to by vendors that try to market "stripped down" versions of their enterprise class products as small business versions. But a lot of them don’t want to spend the much larger sums required to purchase those enterprise class products either.

So if they’re faced with a choice of paying a lot more for the true enterprise class product or a bit more for a stripped down version of it or quite a bit less for a home/personal product that will do as much as they need it to do, you can see why quite a few of them would opt for the cheapest option.

When you consider that quite a lot of small businesses don’t actually have a real life IT manager as such, you can understand why they might be tempted to go for an approach that requires minimal IT management. And it is technology they are familiar with through their other lives as "home/personal" users of IT.

It’s possible many of them don’t recognise the "danger" of using a home/personal product instead of a business class one. From a channel perspective, it’s significant that only 29% of those surveyed had referred to an IT specialist before making data storage decisions. Does this mean they don’t think it’s important enough to warrant seeking advice from an IT specialist? If so, is that a failing on their part or the storage industry’s?

It could well be that the problem is as much to do with the way vendors have developed, marketed and sold their products as any perceived ignorance on the part of small and medium sized business customers. That confusion over how products are segmented may well extend to how they are sold. While the rationale for paying an IT specialist to become involved in the purchase and deployment of storage solutions is all too clear at an enterprise level, it’s probably a lot more uncertain for many small and medium sized businesses, especially if most of their own experience of using storage technology is at a home/personal level.

Hudson makes a good point when he says small and medium sized businesses should consider networked storage for the benefit of centralised storage for multiple employees rather than relying on multiple storage devices for each individual. But to get them to consider it, vendors and channel partners need to make a convincing argument. The survey findings would suggest they have quite a way to go.