… Arcserve …

Arcserve LLC, in backup and recovery technology, has developed a list of the top trends in data protection for 2015 and what’s expected to change in 2016.

Top Data Protection Trends of 2015 (Year in Review):

• As organizations of all sizes have increasingly adopted virtualization, data protection solutions for hybrid environments have become more critical to reduce costs, risk of data loss and complexity.
• Highly publicized data failures had a tremendous impact on business profitability and consumer trust for many companies, pushing IT staffs to adhere to even more rigorous RPOs/RTOs.
• Deduplication has become a requirement across all market segments, causing confusion of what successful deduplication means. Varying methods have made it difficult to compare performance apples-to-apples.
• The purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) market underwent a generational evolution with the emergence of cloud-native appliances. Levels of adoption have increased in combination with cloud deployments.
• Cloud adoption for data protection grew and became a more widely accepted and established method of data protection and DR. In many cases, organizations are now replacing traditional tape with cloud deployments (but tape still won’t die in 2016 – see below).
• Managed Services Providers (MSPs) were increasingly seen as the go-to business/IT partners for data protection.
   

2016 Predictions

• Hybrid solutions will increase due to cloud-based DRaaS offering significant cost advantages over traditional DR methods without sacrificing performance.
• Advances in virtual system data protection will bring improvements for migration, monitoring, storage management and replication (on-premise to the cloud and cloud-to-cloud). Virtual system adoption will continue to rise but many organizations will still require physical systems for core applications, performance and reliability.
• The trend toward cloud-based enterprise applications will increase the need to protect cloud-based enterprise data. Data protection solutions will adopt new features to protect cloud-based applications for long-term backup retention and information governance/compliance needs of the organization.
• Cost control measures will continue to drive end users to find ways to reduce data protection costs without sacrificing performance or increasing risk. Key means to reduce costs associated with long-term backup, retention and DR will be product consolidation, data reduction, WAN optimization through deduplication and compression, and third party public clouds.
• Contrary to popular belief, tape will not die in 2016 but will continue its trip further offline as a reliable and cheap long-term (cold) archive. However, it will continue to be replaced by cloud solutions in certain retention use cases.