According to IDC's Worldwide Storage-as-a-Service Market Size and Forecast, 2005-2012 Multiclient Study(1), IDC "projected the amount of information created, captured and replicated would increase 6 fold by 2010 reaching a total of 988 exabytes worldwide. With this continued data growth, the challenge of managing this data also increases. The drivers for adoption of different Storage-as-a-Service offerings are on the first order cost savings and on the second order the ability to outsource IT tasks to a third party either due to limited IT resources or the ability to use them for other, more strategic purposes."

http://uk.sys-con.com/node/758439

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