Top 4 Trends for Global Backup-as-a-Service Market Through 2020 – Technavio

Technavio‘s (Infiniti Research Limited) backup-as-a-service market report highlights four key emerging trends predicted to impact market growth through 2020.

Technavio defines an emerging trend as something that has potential for significant impact on the market and contributes to its growth or decline.

“IT organizations are concerned about data security because information technology has become a serious business today. Most enterprises fear losing data because such losses can create serious repercussions on businesses, such as damage to reputation, profit loss, reduced productivity, and missed business opportunities,” said Amit Sharma, industry analyst for cloud computing, Technavio.

“Such losses can also create chaos among various departments, and may result in heavier traffic for help desks and may take longer support times. In addition, such disruptions can negatively influence system up and downtime. Therefore, effective backup as a service helps IT companies to establish a smooth work environment designed to reduce macro management of IT departments, ensure a work-life balance for employees, and strengthen employment security,” added Amit.

Market research study identifies
following four emerging trends expected to propel global backup-as-a-service market:

• Increased adoption of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) technology in workforce
• Cloud backup for VMs
• Convergence in cloud backup services and recovery
• Automatic retrieval and backup

Increased adoption of SMAC technology in workforce
The ubiquity of mobile devices and social networking platforms in the workplace allows workforces to function remotely and communicate during an emergency. Therefore, mobile devices enable BC during disasters, help support business operations, and minimize downtime. Such mobility trends will likely gain greater momentum and so, it is important for businesses to implement system protocols to backup employees’ mobile devices.

Similarly, social networking can be leveraged as an alternative to provide effective and critical disaster management. Such platforms also improve the chances of successful emergency communications and reduce the risk of dependency on traditional methods.

Cloud backup for VMs
Virtualization is now an integral part of IT infrastructure. Many enterprises have committed to pursue virtualization beyond 50% benchmarks over the next few years. The technology offers many business benefits, including rapid provisioning and better utilization of system resources. Many organizations are seeking to implement agentless solutions for the backup and recovery of VMs. However, technological limitations (as of 2015) have compelled enterprises to use separate solutions for backing up physical and VMs.

VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Parallels, and Linux KVM offer various iterations of virtualization platforms. Cloud backup services help users to backup and restore multiple virtual and physical servers using a single, integrated service. We note that agentless backup, improved performance, enterprise scalability, multiple platform support, and quick and simple recovery are prominent features of VMs.

Convergence in cloud backup services and recovery
Convergence is an emerging trend in the online backup services space. The convergence of networking, computing, and storage denotes the movement of enterprise data from physical storage (such as tape disk and local severs) to virtual servers operating in the cloud. Convergence includes software-defined storage, hardware abstraction, networking services, central orchestration, and geo-distributed architecture, which help IT infrastructure to become an efficient and agile service. The convergence of backup and archiving also reduces capital uptake and lowers operational costs, in addition to simplifying IT processes. We note that the use of recovery technology should make for robust and efficient backups.

Automatic retrieval and backup
One of the biggest advantages of using backup as a service is the automatic backup of data that service providers execute on a daily or weekly basis. Some backup-as-a-service providers such as Carbonite, iDrive, and Mozy, upload the system files to their servers and make an image of the data to provide information backup. This streamlines the creation and sharing of business documents over a collaborative platform, and so helps companies to boost operational efficiency and business transparency.