While your storage management strategy should be focused on stabilizing your current storage environment, it should also support your organization's business plans and goals. Acquisitions and mergers, new projects, new technology, consolidation of data centers, data warehouses, exponential data growth, costs, and resource issues — all of these factors must be considered when assessing your storage requirements for the future. Chi Corporation's Requirements Definition and Gap Analysis service consists of an analysis of your current business plan and a high-level assessment of the resulting storage requirements.

Assessed areas include availability; backup, restore, archive, and media requirements; disaster recovery; event monitoring; error handling and report distribution/usage; growth projections; and future projects that can affect storage requirements. The outcome of this analysis includes a high-level definition of your current and future storage requirements outlined in a document that can be shared with users, managers, and vendors.