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Zetta.net: Online Backup and Recovery Predictions for 2013

VMblog Predictions

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). 

Published Friday, January 04, 2013 1:34 PM by David Marshall
Comments
VMblog.com - Virtualization Technology News and Information for Everyone - (Author's Link) - January 15, 2013 6:59 AM

First, I'd like to personally thank everyone for being a valued member and reader of VMblog! Once again, with the help of each of you, VMblog has been able to remain one of the oldest and most successful virtualization and cloud news sites on the Web

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