Backup: the IT task that never seems to be fixed. No one wants to deal with it, yet everyone understands that being without it is foolhardy for both the company and the individuals responsible for ensuring IT operations.
In the 2012 ESG IT spending research report,1 improving data backup and recovery tied as the number-one IT priority reported by respondents, alongside increased use of server virtualization. That should come as no surprise when one considers that, while virtualization solves many IT delivery and deployment challenges, the ease of provisioning new VMs can create inordinate storage demand. That VM “sprawl,” combined with the ever-increasing size of unstructured (file) data as well as databases and e-mail—add up to the very reasonable outcome that “backup” is top-of-mind for many IT professionals, virtualization and application owners, business stakeholders, and executive managers.
ESG research also found that many aspects of the status quo in backup are deemed unsatisfactory. In fact, when asked what they would do if they could re-architect their entire backup solution from scratch, only 32% of respondents to a recent ESG research surveyFigure 1). On the other hand, 44% of organizations stated that they would use a new backup solution while the remaining 16% said that they would use a cloud-based solution instead of an in-house one. 2 said that they would stay with their existing solution.