Addressing compliance concerns will become the number one priority for UK storage managers in the next few years, say analysts, as companies struggle to ensure they do not fall foul of industry rules and regulations governing the way data is retained and retrieved.

Up until this year, consolidation, cost reduction and high availability have consistently been the priorities for enterprises looking to upgrade storage software. But Carla Arend, programme manager for European storage software and services at IDC, believes the emphasis is about to shift.

“Compliance requirements will be increasingly important in the EU over the next few years, and companies will invest in [replication, data protection, archiving and management] solutions purely to address those requirements,” Arend said.

The UK Data Protection Act demands that all electronic documents must be kept for a certain time in a certain way and must be quickly retrievable, and similar EU rules are also in place for other member states. Industry regulations and best practice guidelines, including Basel II rules for the financial sector, make similar demands.

Companies that operate in other regions of the world must also comply with local corporate governance regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) in the US.

Increased reliance on archiving and hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions will help companies move data from primary to secondary storage media, in line with requirements, added Arend. The replication of data from branch offices into the datacentres, and datacentre mirroring will also grow in importance, as companies look to build more resilient disaster recovery and data protection strategies.