IT strategies have changed over the years due to several factors, including technological advancements and an uncertain economy. However, the basic fundamentals of all IT departments remain the same – providing support to businesses in the face of any incident that may be detrimental to a company’s productivity and earnings. That’s why today, with the increased amount of data flowing through corporate systems, business continuity and disaster recovery remain the top priority for IT professionals.

Yesterday this blog reported that cloud solutions were leading IT spending growth. Today, an article in Sys-Con media points to the fact that IT departments are showing a greater emphasis on all storage and backup systems. According to the news source, revenue in the digital storage industry grew 10.3 percent in 2010 alone. This shows that businesses are committed to finding solutions that can handle greater data volumes.

Moreover, not only are IT professionals concerned with accommodating the sheer size of data, they also want to improve storage efficiency. Reducing data duplication is listed as a major priority for IT professionals, according to the article.

“Industry analysts estimate that nearly 75 percent of existing data is redundant. That creates a storage problem, and it also makes the job of performing daily backups needlessly cumbersome,” Darrell Riddle, the author of the article, wrote. “IT pros want to accelerate backup times, minimize failed backups, improve recovery time objectives and reduce the cost and complexity of doing this work. Deduplication is the best way to realize those goals.”

As Riddle explained, reducing data duplication will improve the speed and efficiency in which data is restored and can allow businesses to get back on track following a disaster. Partnering with an IT services provider can give businesses the tools they need to improve data and backup efficiency.