Today, storing, protecting and managing your corporate business data is a complex, costly, error prone and time consuming endeavor. This paper details the challenges that IT departments face in delivering reliable data storage services to their business users and applications. It describes the requirements for the ideal data storage system from the perspective of four corporate organizational roles; end-users, CTOs, IT administrators and CIOs. It then concludes by outlining the progressive technology needed to make this ideal storage system a reality, and proposes a solution ?C Self-protecting Storage.