The storage industry is dynamic, but some things never change: the need for more storage capacity and the endless search for better, less tedious ways to protect data. The biggest catalyst to India’s Storage story was definitely the exponential increase in the amounts of data being generated by Indian organizations of all hues and sizes. 

On the one hand, technology advancement in the storage area is putting immense pressure on CIOs and CTOs to create a long-term roadmap for their organization. Advancement in the areas of virtualisation, provisioning and the basic ‘storage brick’ is impacting the way storage was looked at till today. On the other hand - conceptual changes in security, information life cycle management and backup are also creating new types of disruptions. Worldwide CIOs and CTOs are putting in valuable time to learn these technologies and their advancements and adapt them to suit the needs of their organisations. IDC has a Storage Research Practice in India for over five years now. This team has tracked the development and growth of the India Enterprise Storage market closely from both vendor and user perspectives. 

As per IDC the Enterprise Storage market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 98.4% over the next 5 years (2006-11). A significant portion of this growth would be contributed by organisations (especially SMB enterprises) in cities other than the top four metros.

• How critical is it to have a storage and information management strategy? How does storage fit into the overall scheme of business risk mitigation? 

• Right-fit of the storage infrastructure for an organization as per its specific business needs

• How important role, is Information protection going to play in next few years and evolution in this area 

• Can software/hardware enable my IT management to effectively control the complexity and envisaged growth in storage?

• Positioning storage to support Information Life-Cycle management

• How can intelligent storage deployment reduce the cost of configuration, capacity utilization and data replication? Measuring Cost Vs Technology – ROI

• What are the consequences of the commoditization of storage hardware? 

• How do storage managers view iSCSI and IP-based storage networks?

• What will matter most as we move into a world of modular computing and storage resources, grids and web services?

• Critical issue of reference data storage management for archival/storage/retrieval in order to meet regulatory requirements.

• The Google Effect: How to compete, manage and withstand the impact of increased storage allocation?

• BC/DR & Security: How to prepare and foresee the impact of unpredictable global/local environment on your business and IT infrastructure.

• Virtualisation and Management: Increasingly global nature of business and mobile workforce should be prepared to handle the storage and security requirements from remote locations/mobile executives/partner networks.

• CIOs/CTOs/IT Heads and VPs/GMs of IT from large Indian enterprises and foreign enterprises with a sizable operational base in India 

• COOs/CFOs and other senior decision makers from large enterprises