Metalogix Survey Highlights Explosive Growth of SharePoint Content: Average Environment Exceeds 1TB

Feb. 15, 2013 - PRLog -- Metalogix, the leading provider of content infrastructure software to improve  the use and performance of enterprise content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms, today released survey findings that provide insight into the numerous SharePoint challenges faced by organizations including rapid content growth, cloud adoption and SharePoint migration (http://www.metalogix.com/Products/Content-Matrix.aspx). Executed at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, NV, November 12-15, 2012, over 100 SharePoint administrators and IT directors from large financial firms to government agencies participated.

SharePoint Content Growth

The results of the survey show that SharePoint content continues to grow at explosive rates, with 50 percent of users having over a terabyte of content in their SharePoint environment and 15 percent responding they had more than 10 terabytes of content. In addition, the average SharePoint user surveyed has experienced nearly 75 percent content growth year-over-year.

SharePoint Upgrades and the Cloud

The study showed that while 90 percent of respondents are on SharePoint 2010, nearly 40 percent are still operating SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 farms. In addition, the survey found that respondents were almost evenly split on the use of Office 365, with 55 percent of respondents electing to stay completely on-premises, while 45 percent plan to use Office 365 for all or some content. This could indicate that some adopters of on-premises technology could be too invested to attempt the move to Office 365.

SharePoint 2013 and Mobility

With the introduction of SharePoint 2013, a significant number of respondents plan to upgrade, with over 60 percent planning to upgrade within the next year. Highlighting the growth of mobile devices in the enterprise, over 50 percent of respondents listed mobile device support as the feature they are most likely to deploy in SharePoint 2013. Additional features in SharePoint 2013 that users are likely to deploy include new community sites, new MySites and managed navigation based on metadata.

SharePoint Migration

The survey also found interesting data points on the use of SharePoint itself, with respondents listing high-fidelity (maintaining metadata, permissions and versioning information) as the most important aspect of SharePoint migration (http://www.metalogix.com/Products/Content-Matrix.aspx), followed by pre-migration planning, no downtime and speed of moving content. The survey also showed that over 50 percent of users leverage another content repository along with SharePoint, and their biggest challenge with the other repositories is the ability to migrate content to and from SharePoint.  

“The hyper growth of enterprise content farms combined with the introduction of SharePoint 2013 provided the unique opportunity to understand the needs of the SharePoint community,” said Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix. “While many in the community acknowledge that content is growing rapidly, the rate of growth identified in this survey is beyond expectations and highlights the infrastructure management issues facing IT. From migrating and upgrading to the latest version of SharePoint to synchronizing content across multiple locations and evaluating opportunities within the cloud, organizations will continue to face challenges improving cost effective knowledge sharing and collaboration, unless they implement the processes and infrastructure necessary to proactively manage the growth of their content.”

For additional details on the results of the survey, please visit: www.metalogix.com/2013SharePointSurvey