Looking back on 2010, the uncertain economic environment has continued to force CIOs to cut capital spending and rein in costs for management and administration. On the other hand, the CIO's need to find technology solutions to help their companies work smarter and give them the competitive edge has led to a rise in interest and demand for virtualisation and cloud-based storage, data deduplication and solid state storage technology.The cost savings, benefits and productivity enhancements from the use of these technologies means local businesses are in a far stronger position to capture the early ‘green shoot’ growth we are seeing as the economy rebounds. CIOs are now concentrating on implementing solutions that optimise existing resources and infrastructure.The focus on upgrading and streamlining technology infrastructure to be cost effective, optimised and efficient will continue to be a big driver heading into 2011.Smart storage technology is helping businesses achieve desired savings and efficiencies in the following ways: Storage virtualisation can maximise data center performance while reducing costs. In order for businesses to reap the full potential of a virtualised infrastructure, storage, server and networking solutions need to be converged. A converged infrastructure eliminates costly and complex siloed IT environments by unifying individual stacks of storage, servers and networking into a single virtualised environment, enabling businesses to focus on innovative growth.Cloud-based storage continues to change how companies commoditise and store exponential amounts of data. The question now isn’t whether or not businesses will use cloud computing, but rather can they can do it successfully? Cloud-based storage allows companies to reduce the costs that surround data storage management by delivering file storage in a self-managed, easy-to-access way.Data deduplication can make backups and archiving more capacity-efficient and subsequently more cost efficient. Backup solutions that store redundant information over and over again consume unnecessary storage space, electricity, and bandwidth, creating a chain of cost and resource inefficiencies that hinder increased data growth within businesses. Deduplication enables businesses to effectively manage exponential data growth. Although the technology is still evolving, it is becoming part of a business’s primary storage solution. Solid state storage technology promises to transform the high-performance disk market. Until now businesses have been cautious in adopting the technology as it matures, but as it has become more affordable, businesses are increasingly attracted to solid state storage’s reliability.Green storage initiatives remain important despite the tougher economic conditions. This trend is here to stay as IDC predicts that energy consumption and space constraints will continue to drive investments in transforming the data center. To reduce energy costs, businesses need to employ a practical and effective green storage approach that will eliminate hardware sprawl and cut down wasted capacity to save on power and cooling costs. Customers are also placing pressure on businesses, and in turn CIOs, to reduce their carbon footprint and the data center is one area where clear efficiencies can be found.