2013 Predictions for Online Backup and Recovery

Zetta.net unveiled five predictions for the online backup and recovery market for 2013, all pointing to the broader adoption of online backup in more industries and the extinction of hardware backup appliances.

From education and government, to SMBs and large enterprises with distributed office locations, online backup will become mainstream as organizations seek hassle-free, lower cost reliable solutions.

1. Online backup will become dominant
in SMB, education, and local government:

• The types of organizations that have the most to gain from cloud server backup and DR are SMBs, large enterprises with distributed offices, education institutions, and local governments.
• Why:
• Better security standards are exceeding what the majority of SMBs and distributed offices of large enterprises do in-house, and secure online server backup enables governments and schools to meet compliance requirements in a way that tape can’t.
• Enterprise-grade performance – speed, security and functionality – is available at an affordable cost, making online server backup accessible to companies like never before. A company with 300+ employees can backup 4TB of new data in less than 24 hours and make it accessible anywhere in the world.
• Online server backup is only a fraction of the cost required for backup software, storage, support and offsite services – not including the time and resources spent managing multiple products and vendors.

2. Appliance dinosaurs give way to hybrid backup 2.0

The meteor has hit but the appliance dinosaurs are still alive. Hybrid backup 2.0 combines replicated data in the cloud with a ‘lean local’ copy of large database files – without the hardware required by hybrid-online backup 1.0. Hybrid-cloud 2.0 offers capabilities – like remote offsite backup – that make appliance-based backup solutions look like dinosaurs. In 2013, smarter species will thrive and purpose built backup appliances will gradually die out.

3. High-performance enterprise online server backup
will establish its own category

Enterprise online server backup has been available for a while now, but its adoption was limited by performance, which itself was largely limited by bandwidth. In 2013, cloud solutions will hit the main stage, spurred on by the result of so many SMBs and distributed enterprises increasing their bandwidth.

4. Integrated backup, DR and archiving
make data protection achievable for SMBs

Until 2012, only a tiny percentage of SMBs could afford to implement a complete data protection strategy – DR and archiving in addition to backup. But new technologies such as hybrid-cloud 2.0 streamline data protection into a single solution. SMBs no longer have to piece together an expensive solution comprised of multiple products from disparate vendors. This ease of deployment and affordability will lead to the mainstream adoption of integrated data protection among SMBs.

5. Large enterprises will leverage
online backup vendors for distributed offices

Large enterprises with petabytes of data to backup and protect, tend to build their own datacenters to perform backups in-house. But large enterprises also tend to have many offices distributed throughout the world – adding the hardware and personnel required of a datacenter in each of them is an expensive proposition. These organizations will increasingly take advantage of hybrid-online backup 2.0 for their distributed offices to reduce the cost and complexity associated with backups all around.

Full Online Backup and Recovery Predictions 2013