Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Bob Maeser, CTO & VP R&D, data protection, Quest Software (now part of Dell)
Decrease in Backup Solutions, Increase in Protection of Services: Five 2013 Predictions
Virtually every major trend impacting IT today is making backup and
recovery more challenging and more complex-from rampant data growth and
increase in the importance of data to widespread adoption of server
virtualization, the trend toward cloud computing, and the boom in remote
offices. As a result, a growing number of organizations, from the small
business to the Fortune 500 enterprise, are prioritizing the need for
simplicity, serviceability and reliability from their data protection solutions.
Below are five predictions I expect to see in the coming year.
1. Organizations
will revert back to single, multi-purpose backup solutions ... with a twist
As virtualization became common throughout the data center, IT began
augmenting physical backup solutions with VM-only backup solutions.
Organizations were willing to sacrifice the simplicity of a single solution to
ensure they had protection for their VMs in addition to on-premise data.
Ironically, the continued proliferation of virtualization will now drive
customers back the other way, toward the convenience of a single-source backup
and recovery platform. However, even if most companies pass the tipping point
whereby a greater percentage of their data center is virtual than physical,
certain applications and servers will never be virtualized, and the need for
legacy physical backup capabilities will remain in place. Realizing this,
organizations will once again seek the simplicity of a single backup solution
that can protect both physical and virtual servers. Only this time, they will
do so with a virtual-first lens, looking first at a product's proficiency in
protection of virtual environments.
2. Protection
of services will be prioritized over protecting infrastructure
Backup and recovery today tends to focus on one-off protection of
disparate servers and storage systems. But with virtualization and cloud
permeating the data center, there's a never-before-seen level of fluidity.
Organizational tolerance for business and IT service downtime is now
non-existent, and storing data copies with no eye on recovery will not suffice.
Backup operations will need to adapt to become more closely associated with the
need for business and technology service continuity, rather than merely
focusing on protecting specific infrastructure components. To facilitate this,
global data protection management will become more centralized in order to more
closely align with an organization's service level expectations and
corresponding service level agreements (SLAs) for protecting a given
application and/or business service.
3. Protecting
the remote office will become a top priority
As enterprises spread across the globe and virtual offices become the
norm rather than the exception, more and more critical company data will be
created outside of corporate headquarters at remote and branch office (ROBO)
locations. As a result, organizations will no longer be able to afford to treat
the protection of ROBOs as an afterthought. Disparate strategies for protecting
these locations will converge as organizations seek to unify the protection of
key data and applications regardless of where they reside geographically.
4.
Use of point products to protect critical
applications will decrease
Companies have traditionally relied on a variety of point
products to protect critical applications, largely because of the perceived
ability of those tools to deliver more reliable backups and more granular
restores. But spurred by a renewed desire to reduce multi-product complexity,
provide integrated and consistent protection for all application components and
simplify the overall management of data protection, organizations will move
away from application-specific backup solutions. Not simply willing to
sacrifice the powerful capabilities those points solutions offered, however,
organizations will instead seek (and demand) those application friendly
features from their enterprise backup solution.
5.
Adoption of purpose-built backup appliances
will continue to rise
The purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market has seen
tremendous growth in recent years, as organizations look to appliances in order
to optimize their data protection initiatives. Driven by organizations' ongoing
need to shrink backup windows, decrease restore and recovery times, and enable
integration across data protection applications, this growth will remain strong
in 2013 as the adoption of PBBAs continues to rise.
###
About the Author
Bob Maeser, CTO and VP of R&D, data protection, Quest
Software (now part of Dell)
Bob Maeser is chief technology officer and vice president of
research and development for data protection at Quest Software (now part of
Dell), where his team is responsible for defining and developing market-leading
backup and recovery solutions that span physical, virtual, application and
cloud environments. An R&D veteran with more than 29 years of industry
experience, Maeser's experience includes executive leadership positions with
cloud and MSP companies, and technical leadership roles with
Microsoft, HP, and NCR R&D. He received his Bachelors degree in Computer
Science from the University of Minnesota, and holds a Master's degree in
software engineering from the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Maeser is
also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional
(CISSP) with the International Information Systems Security Certification
Consortium (ISC)², and holds multiple IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF)
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certifications.