
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Gary Sevounts, vice president of marketing for Zetta.net
Online Backup and Recovery Predictions for 2013
2012 was a breakthrough year for backup and disaster recovery. The
technology behind online and hybrid backup solutions got faster and cheaper -
and organizations of all sizes responded by accelerating adoption. What does
2013 hold?
1. Online Backup Becomes Dominant In SMB,
Education, and Local Government
The types of organizations that have the most to gain from cloud backup
and disaster recovery are small and medium businesses, educational
organizations (especially high schools and colleges) and local governments
(especially townships and smaller cities).
The 3 reasons why cloud backup will become standard for these types of
organizations:
a. Online Backup Has Better Security - Encryption
standards like 256-bit SSL and Salsa20 are standard among the better online
backup services and exceed what the majority of SMBs do in-house. Secure online
backup lets governments and schools meet compliance requirements for sensitive
personal information in a way that tape can't.
b. Enterprise-grade performance - Online
backup gives small companies, schools, and towns an affordable option with
speed, security, and functionality that was only available to large enterprises
until very recently. In one example from an online backup customer, a company
with under 300 employees was able to backup 4TB of new data in less than 24
hours and make it accessible anywhere in the world. That's enterprise-grade
performance that just wasn't possible a few years ago.
c. Online Backup Is a Fraction of The Cost - The
cost of backup software + storage + support + offsiting services adds up. The
biggest "invisible" cost however, is the time you spend managing all these
different products and vendors. Online Backup is a fraction of the cost, with
some vendors starting at $225 a month.
2. The Rise of Hybrid Backup 2.0 and the End
of Appliance Dinosaurs
The meteor has hit but the appliance dinosaurs are still alive. Hybrid
backup 2.0 is the latest version of hybrid-online backup that combines
replicated data in the cloud with a "lean local" copy of large database files.
Compared to hybrid-online backup 1.0 that depends on hardware appliances,
hybrid-online backup 2.0 delivers faster backups, lower costs, and no
single-point-of-failure.
Hybrid-cloud 2.0 offers capabilities - like remote offsite backup -
that make appliance-based backup so lutions look like dinosaurs. In 2013, smarter
species will thrive and purpose built backup appliances will gradually die out.
3. High-Performance Online Backup Gets Its Own
Category
Online backup has been available for a while now, but its adoption was
limited by performance, which itself was largely limited by bandwidth, a T1
connection isn't enough to get the best from the cloud. In 2013, cloud solutions
will hit the main stage, spurred on by the result of so many SMBs (and regional
offices of enterprises) increasing their bandwidth. A company increasing its
available bandwidth is like building an on-ramp to a highway (or freeway as we
say in California). Cloud backup though 2011 was like the state of the national
highway system the 1920's: underpowered cars and limited highway access.
To continue the metaphor, using a backup appliance is like having a car
with a 30mph limit. Over the next year, SMBs and others will increase the
pressure on cloud backup vendors for high-performance features that accelerate
the backup:
a. WAN-Traffic
Optimization
b. Local
Change Detection
c. Multi-threaded
data transfer
d. Datacenters
with majority SSD and RAM storage
4. Adoption of wider data protection
technology in mainstream SMBs
Until 2012, only a tiny percentage of small and medium-sized businesses
were able to afford to implement a complete data protection strategy - disaster
recovery and archiving in addition to backup.
But these technologies, for the first time, are cost-effective for the
majority of SMBs thanks to the development of hybrid-online backup 2.0
discussed in prediction #2 above.
Data protection, comprised of backup, disaster recovery, and archiving
is now available in an affordable single solution. SMBs don't need to piece
together a budget-sucking solution made of various products from different
vendors. In 2013 this ease of deployment and affordability will lead to the
mainstream adoption of integrated data protection among SMBs.
5. Large Enterprises Leverage Online Backup
Vendors for Distributed Offices
Large enterprises with petabytes of data to backup and protect tend to
build their own datacenters and do backup in-house. But large enterprises also
tend to have many offices distributed throughout the world, and can't always
justify adding the hardware and personnel required of a datacenter in each of
them.
So, another trend that we've seen building that will likely accelerate
in 2013 is large enterprises taking advantage of hybrid-online backup 2.0 in
their distributed offices. The reduction in complexity is especially worth it
for big companies a lot of small local offices doing support or sales.
These predictions are trends we've seen over the last year that seem
poised to become bigger in 2013.
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About the Author
Gary Sevounts is vice
president of marketing for Zetta.net, provider of enterprise-grade
3-in-1 backup, disaster recovery and archiving technology for small/medium enterprises, distributed organizations, and managed
service providers (MSPs).