No clear strategy

The survey also asked about storage platforms employed by healthcare organizations. Disk is still the most popular destination for data.

Sixty-five percent of respondents who archive data do so via disk, 33 percent use optical media and 30 percent rely on tape.

When asked whether their organization stores data according to its age or value, 26 percent of respondents said they had a full migration policy that included archiving data to appropriate storage tiers. The majority, 44 percent, indicated that some applications have archiving capabilities. Another 19 percent said they do not have a policy but intend to, while 11 percent said they have no plans to implement an age/value data migration policy.

The U.S. was slightly ahead of its global counterparts with 30 percent claiming a full migration policy and tiered-storage data archiving, with another 41 percent having some applications enabled for data archiving.

According to Cotterill, the acquisition cost of data storage accounts for only about 20 percent of the overall cost of ownership. The majority is tied up in management and maintenance of hardware and software and environmental factors such as the cost of energy. "With a better understanding of the lifecycle of data, healthcare organizations can develop unique storage virtualization strategies that will address increasing data volume in a fiscally responsible manner," he says. "In essence, lifecycle management states that data loses its value as it ages. While it still must be retained according to regulatory or hospital policies, there is no reason to keep older data on the highest-cost storage assets."

In the Clouds?

Seventy percent of global respondents to the Healthcheck survey said they are not using cloud storage. A majority (40 percent) indicated they were unsure whether they would migrate to a cloud environment within the next 24 months and 26 percent had no plan to use cloud storage within that timeframe.

In the United States, 88 percent of respondents do not employ cloud, with 41 percent saying it is not at all likely they will do so in the next two years.