Whats in Store for You?

Worldwide digital information is being generated at a tremendous pace, and hence the need to store and manage this information has fueled the demand for storage professionals. Data storage is a critical exercise for any business to successfully carry out its business. Emerging trends in storage industry have also encouraged an increase in the average storage capacity in organizations. Although storage resources have been increasing along with the digital information deluge, so is the paucity of trained storage professionals.

Market research organization IDC has found the total disk storage systems capacity shipped last year reached 1,645 PB (Petabytes), which grew 56.3% over previous year. In India the disk based storage business is growing at 72% and is expected to reach 1 lakh TB by 2009. IDC also predicts that the booming digital information economy is expected to create a demand for a million storage professionals by the year 2012. A US salary survey for the last year also reveals that storage professionals have the highest average salary amongst all IT specialties. Despite the current global economic uncertainties enterprises need to store their ever-increasing volumes of business data. Thus, even during the current recession, the demand for storage professionals continues to grow.

Information explosion, coupled with regulatory compliance pressures, limited IT budgets and dependency on data centric networks has resulted in organizations to adopt a defined information management strategy that lays emphasis on quality storage professionals. SAN administration is one aspect related to storage domain, DR, archiving and journaling being the others. As data is most important for an enterprise's business, it's imperative for an enterprise to have storage professionals for better designing and management of storage requirements of the company. The demand for such professionals is not specific to a particular vertical, but is spread across all. Be it banking, media/publishing houses or data centers; all need storage professionals. Thus, with increasing demand for such professionals, storage as a career is a safe and lucrative option.