Backup to Become an Attribute of Computing

Asigra Inc. highlighted the company’s emphasis for 2013 – universal backup across diverse IT applications and platforms.

With data being stored on more devices, applications and operating environments than ever before, organizations tasked with protecting this data have relied on a cocktail of backup applications for data recovery. To alleviate the problems of managing multiple backup solutions IT professionals increasingly seek methods to consolidate and optimize these operations. As a result, Asigra is predicting increased industry and customer momentum toward more ubiquitous backup solutions in 2013.

As organizations struggle to develop backup and recovery strategies for data in physical IT environments, virtual and cloud infrastructure and on mobile devices, the trend toward backup consolidation is accelerating. According to analysts, the reason for this is today’s geographically dispersed and increasingly mobile workforce, who expect to access content from anywhere, at any time, in the context of a business process. This is requiring IT professionals to provide assurance that the data from heterogeneous IT platforms is not only secure, but recoverable.

With backup becoming more of an attribute of computing,
Asigra anticipates the following movement
will materialize over the next 12 months:

• Backup technologies will continue their evolution and become increasingly pervasive, allowing business application managers to auto-recover data that is lost due to human error, system failures or natural disasters. As part of this trend, disparate applications will require a unifying backup infrastructure that centralizes the backup vault and provides for multi-platform recovery.
• Cloud and mobile apps will join on-premise applications in receiving enterprise data recovery priority as more business information is generated and stored by these applications.
• Furthermore, an increasing percentage of corporate data repositories (physical, virtual, cloud and mobile) will be incorporated into a single backup infrastructure.
• Users will have more options than ever before when it comes to aligning backup costs with business requirements for data availability. More enterprises will turn to solutions that allow IT professionals to prioritize and assign mission critical data for near-instant recoverability while retaining, yet de-prioritizing, less critical data on recovery platforms that are matched to recover data based on the value of that information.
• Because of the significant gains in efficiency, data accessibility, affordability and the ability to provide end-to-end data recoverability, enterprise cloud backup technologies will continue to take market share from legacy backup applications, especially tape-based solutions.

"Cloud and mobile computing megatrends are influencing all aspects of information technology, driving the evolution of the workspace," said Jason Buffington, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "As this continues, end users will require access to business information anywhere, anytime and anyplace. With this evolution in IT infrastructure the systems that protect this new data environment will become more encompassing. Asigra’s vision of backup becoming an attribute of computing is one route to meeting tomorrow’s data recovery challenges."

"Business data is becoming more mobile, requiring organizations to respond in a way that protects the integrity and ability to recover this data when needed. With this in mind, developers are working on the next generation of backup technologies that will simplify what is becoming an enormously complex and distributed IT environment for many companies," said Pavan Vyas, product marketing manager, Asigra. "Without a universal backup strategy that secures and centralizes the protection of data across all devices and platforms into a single backup repository, organizations are at risk of losing these precious assets. Fortunately, innovators in the backup space remain on the front lines of this dynamic area and are moving to make backup an attribute of the evolving computing landscape."