Backup and recovery need a radical rethink. When today’s incumbent solutions were designed more than a decade ago, IT environments were exploding, heterogeneity was increasing, and backup and recovery systems were viewed as the protection scheme of last resort. They were intended only to provide a low-cost insurance policy for data, so companies patched together backup and recovery solutions under a common vendor management framework and tried to minimize costs by spreading data across different infrastructure and media.
What has changed? For one, IT departments have moved toward private cloud models with virtualisation and are looking for converged architectures to replace multitier architectures. Second, because the amount of data under management has exploded, IT is challenged to do more with less. IT teams are now composed of fewer specialised roles, and more broad roles. Finally, public and hybrid clouds have opened up new data use cases such as analytics and test/dev, which create challenges for managing and securing that data.