Ten per cent of UK organisations take weeks or months to provision storage

Computing research reveals a worrying lack of agility among some UK businesses

Almost ten per cent of UK-based organisations take weeks, or even months, to provision new storage services.

That's one of the surprising results of Computing's latest research into the area.

The full research will be presented at the 'Data, insight, action - the new imperative' event in London tomorrow morning.

Registration is still open, and the event is free to attend.

When asked 'On average, how long does it take to provision storage for use by virtual machines in your organisation?', seven per cent of respondents answered 'weeks', with two per cent admitting 'months'.

In total, 59 per cent of respondents said it takes them hours or longer, with only six per cent answering that storage can be provisioned in seconds.

The real picture of how long it takes for this storage to be useful is possibly worse still as, even once provisioned, it still needs to be carved up and assigned to the applications that use it and, in a lot of cases, populated with data, adding yet more time.

This lack of speed is at odds with the idea of agile compute services, which can be brought online very quickly using products from various cloud vendors.

The research also examined organisations' ability to migrate and balance storage workloads across platforms.

Here, too, the typical patchwork of storage technologies and vendors appears to be a hindrance, with five per cent of respondents claiming to be unable to migrate workloads at all, and a further 35 per cent only by manually copying the data involved.