In COVID-times, we often hear about “the New Normal” to remind us that things won’t entirely go back to the way that they were. But for World Backup Day (WBD), I’d like to remind you of an “Old Normal” that has not changed – your data is still YOUR DATA.

I’ve been in IT and specifically within Data Protection for over 30 years, and one of the only truths that have stayed consistent across all the changes in server OS’s, server/storage architectures, physical-to-virtual, and now everyone’s journey to the cloud is that your data is still YOUR DATA and therefore must be backed up.

• If not being able to recover from an IT outage puts your organization out of business, it is just YOUR ORGANIZATION that goes out of business … not your cloud provider; not your reseller partner; not your consultant; just you.
• If not being able to restore important data costs you YOUR JOB, you are the only one fired … not the IT professional at your service provider and not your IT architect who doesn’t actually touch a server keyboard anymore and probably not even your boss; just you.

Simply put, no one has as much to lose as you do when it comes to insufficiencies in your data recoverability. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned that your “partners” and “extended teams” are; your organization’s data is still your responsibility.

• Even if you are leveraging Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) where you have a team of dedicated professionals who are experts in not only backup but resumption of IT processes for the sake of your company … it is still your organization’s data and still YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Those other folks genuinely do want to “help you” with your recovery, but whether you are able to recover (or not) truly only affects your organization (not theirs).
• Even if you are using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) like Office 365, which is in fact natively durable (against site failures), those platforms do not back up your data because that is not their job. SaaS ensures that the service is always running; you are responsible for retaining previous versions (backups) for months or years, regardless of whether you are running on servers or services.

This isn’t meant to be a dire warning or a “soap box”, just a reality check – no matter what changes in IT from Servers/Storage to Services/Microservices … there are some “old normal” tenets that still apply:

• Users will continue to make mistakes, so you need previous versions (like backups)
• Regulations will continue to require retention, so you need long-term copies (like backups)
• Bad actors will continue to do bad things, so you need air-gapped copies that can are assured to be clean
• Nature will continue to take down cities, power grids, and entire regions, so you need remote copies that are ready to be run for the sake of the broader organization

There is a lot of “new normal” out there, in life and in IT … and it is true that we aren’t “going back” to racks and racks of 2U and 4U servers, stacked on top of SANs (unless you are running private cloud architectures at scale). But even then, most PlatformOps scenarios would tell you that core IT will be increasingly focused on architecting a flexible framework of underlying infrastructure, so that a broader variety of developers and application owners will self-manage their provisioned portions of a “new normal” hybrid ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the “old normal” of you still have to back up your data still applies.

Happy World Backup Day

Originally published on LinkedIn.com

Do you statistically need 3,000 respondents to understand a trend? NO, you do not, but …

• You do need 3,000 respondents if you want to cut by country and region, in order to understand the different drivers and challenges in North America versus Australia versus Germany (and everywhere in between). There are 28 different regional cuts being offered by Veeam teams and our partners, so that you can understand what is driving data protection in your part of the world.
• You do need 3,000 respondents if you want to cut by vertical industry, so that you can understand what Healthcare organizations are striving towards versus Financial establishments versus Public Sector institutions. Many organizations and industries responded to COVID and leveraged the cloud differently, and that affects their data protection strategies. Case in point, this survey had 259 Healthcare institutions, which is enough to do a whole separate (and statistically definitive) “Data Protection Trends in Healthcare in 2021” report. BOOM!!

There are lots of ways to cut the data, all of which are meant to ensure that Veeam continues to understand where customers want to go and how quickly they want to go there; so that we can help them back themselves up along the way and when they get there. There are arguably four categories in the data protection vendor landscape:

• Legacy data center-centric vendors
• Shiny unicorns in appliance formfactors
• Small startups that aren’t really on anyone’s radar
• Veeam

To understand the scale of this research, this survey had more respondents than some of those unicorns and startups have in total paying customers, period. #MicDrop

At Veeam, our goal is to continue to disrupt the IT market and lead innovation in data protection, just as we have since introducing VM backups into the all-physical world of yesteryear’s data centers. With five cloud-centric solutions (Office 365, Azure-hosted, AWS-hosted, GCP-hosted, and Kubernetes) already in market and more to come, the way that Veeam stays in front of where the market is going is by understanding the market; and that takes strategic research at scale. It’s one of the reasons that three years ago, Veeam hired two industry analysts, each with 30 years of data protection market experience, into the Veeam Office of the CTO. It has been my absolute privilege to collaborate daily with my research partner and former “Father of the Gartner MQ on Backup” Dave Russell (@BackupDave) on this project and several others.

Do you need 3,000 research respondents to create a marketing graph for your datasheet or webinar? No. But that isn’t why Veeam does research. Veeam looks at where you are going in IT to ensure that we can provide you reliable protection and recoverability of your data, wherever you need it.

By the end of Q1 of 2021, Veeam will have garnered over 5,500 respondents from a variety of personas that affect data protection strategy for current-gen and next-gen IT platforms. By the end of 2021, we’ll have shared the insights of nearly 10,000 independent, unbiased IT Professionals and IT Decision Makers related to what is driving their data protection methodologies. Because your IT strategies are what is driving Veeam’s strategy as we continue to lead our industry — not only in innovative technologies, but also in thought leadership for how data protection and data management must evolve to better meet your goals.

If you haven’t already, please check out the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report for 2021.

Also, don’t forget to check out our Industry Insights live streams on LinkedIn with a #dataprotectionreport hashtag.

As always, ping me at @JBuff — we’re here to help.

originally published on Veeam.com

The Data Protection (and IT) Evolutionary Cycle

About every ten years, a few elements of IT history typically repeat themselves:

PHASE 1: The production platform of choice for IT fundamentally and architecturally changes. It starts as a niche architecture that meets a nascent need, but as early adopter organizations start to see the possibility, it becomes a mainstream IT platform – and seemingly overnight, everyone is talking about that platform as the inevitable future.

PHASE 2: When the production platform starts to shift or expand, the defacto marketshare leaders in data protection typically try to apply their last-generation approach to backup to the new model. It appears to work on the surface, because they are thought of as industry leaders and they are using language that their core backup buyer is comfortable with like “agents” and “storage snapshots.”

• Part of why those backup leaders take that approach is because their forward-leaning customers are demanding “any” kind of answer to assure them that what they have been using and intend to use in their present-mode IT is still the right choice. So, those customers want to be assured that their vendor will continue to be relevant and leading-edge.
• The other part is because those vendors are mainly focused on retaining their current customers and expanding through those organizations, they tend to minimize investments in R&D around what will happen next. This creates an opportunity for startup disruptors.

PHASE 3: One or a few small innovators recognize that the production platform will require a reimagination of how data protection should be done. It is often with the acknowledgement that the production platform lacks the API’s or other “plumbing” to make data protection universally achievable, so the innovators have to do more of the technical heavy-lifting to accomplish the kinds of backups that the mainstream will invariably demand.

Those innovative little backup solutions are subsequently deployed for the new platform as a “complement” to the overall IT backup strategy and the incumbent mainstream backup tool. And this works fine, until the overall IT platform of choice starts to shift to the new platform.

Two Options on What Happens Next

Option 1 – Market Normalization through APIs

In some cases, the next gen production platform vendor recognizes one of the adoption blockers for mainstream users (versus early adopters) is the lack of foundational IT services like being back-up-able. As such, after the first years, the platform creates new methods for backup software vendors to interact with the data. We saw this when Microsoft added VSS nearly ten years after NT was first introduced and again when VMware added Storage APIs for backup in v5. At that point, legacy vendors try to catch up by using the APIs, while the innovator startups try to capitalize on their early-mover advantage to maintain dominance.

Option 2 – The Tail wags the Dog

The legacy IT platform is eventually usurped by the new IT platform. In doing so, the little backup solution for the new platform eventually becomes the organization’s primary backup, since the platform being protected has become the organization’s primary production platform. This can be accelerated if the little/niche backup solution also intentionally expands its use cases from just the new platform to also include protection of the legacy platform(s).

Where do we go from here?

Everything described above is historical from AS400 to NetWare to Windows to Virtualization (from the mid-1980’s to 2020), but there is something different this time. In the past, mainstream IT had one preeminent platform of choice – e.g. when one embraced Windows Server, it came with the assumption that NetWare would be phased out of the datacenter. Similarly, the measure of Virtualization is whether a datacenter is 70%, 80%, or even 90% virtualized (with very few and individually justified physical platforms remaining).

This time around, there is not a single or inevitable “hero” architecture for Hybrid-IT. 

• Within the datacenter, most organizations have given up on virtualizing “everything”. Instead, there is a recognition that some workloads ought to be on standalone metal – and for “everything else” (on-premises), virtualize it. Moreover, almost no one believes that the datacenter itself will go away any time soon. Instead, Hybrid-IT is the desired endstate, not just the transitional period between on-prem and the eventual and universal cloud of the future.
• As for “the cloud,” there isn’t one – there are many and will be many. The data protection ramifications of that are significant, because each kind of cloud architecture requires a different approach to backup and recovery. Just like you should not back up on-prem VMs like you back up on-prem physical servers, you should not (and cannot) back up IaaS VMs the same way as SaaS applications or containers.

This is where Kasten comes in. Kasten recognized that legacy approaches to protecting containers would fall short and so they reimagined what was necessary to back up that nascent platform in its early days – and as containers as a concept and Kubernetes as the predominant approach emerged, Kasten’s vision and strategic significance grew with it – much like Veeam rose while VMware gained prominance over a decade ago.

As an IT vendor, particularly in the data protection space, it is your responsibility to not only continually delight your existing customers, but to innovate (through building or buying) for what customers will want next. Each IT production platform had its early innovators in data protection:

• In the 90’s, NetWare was best protected by Palindrome and ARCserve (spelled correctly then, later purchased by CA, then spun back off)
• In the 2000’s, Windows was best protected by Backup Exec and Commvault Galaxy/Simpana
• In the last decade, VMware is best protected by Veeam. 

It is worth noting that for each production platform generation, there are early innovators. Some become the dominant backup platforms for their era (listed above) and the rest are bought for their IP or eventually go out of business for not reaching success velocity (due to technology or go-to-market). Looking ahead, for a data protection vendor to be successful in the next era of “the cloud”, they’ll have to address:

• IaaS backups across all three of the hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google)
• SaaS – with Office365 being by far the most strategic and pervasive
• And Containers, which is relatively synonymous with Kubernetes at this point

When you modernize production,

you must modernize protection.

Along with that axiom, two lessons that IT history has taught us are:

1. You cannot (or should not) back up tomorrow’s IT with yesterday’s mechanisms.
2. The leader in data protection is determined by who has the vision to reimagine backup for what’s next, regardless of how they backed up what came before it.

It’s those last truths that make Veeam’s investments in backup for Office 365 and AWS/Azure over the past few years so important – and why Veeam’s purchase of Kasten is so significant.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn, with the following context intro:

I’ve been in the #DataProtection industry for 31 years, starting as an IT Pro swapping tapes, later as a channel partner deploying new #backup solutions, but for the most part within backup or replication software vendors that were (fortuitously for me) disrupting their respective markets. Disclosure: I currently work for Veeam.

• Reducing lost work due to systems’ or storage failures (or cyber-attacks) which would otherwise require employees to recreate what was lost or corrupted
• Reducing fines and penalties associated with failure to retain data as mandated by regulatory or compliance directives

If the only thing that you did was create and retain previous versions or copies of your data, you would see the benefits above. If you build on those, the economic benefits of RAPID and RELIABLE RECOVERY include:

• Reducing lost productivity by employees while systems are offline and being recovered. In today’s multi-faceted workplace, most employees could technically move between platforms — e.g. if email is down, they could work on CRM or standalone documents, or vice versa. Those employees may not be “idle,” but they are certainly less-productive (i.e. consider their productivity at 50%-75%). That said, there are industries such as customer service, retail and manufacturing that really do have that single application that users rely on — and are truly idle during downtime.
• Incremental reduction of lost work hours and reduced fines from the backup benefits above, due to users more readily gaining access to the restored data.

Note that the economic “benefits” of better backup and reliable recovery are actually “reduced losses.” That is not a misnomer, nor does it devalue backup and recovery. Think of downtime and data loss like leaky plumbing in your home or office. Pipes leak; IT breaks; that is just reality. You pay for the water that you use, and you pay for the water that you lose. Fixing leaky pipes and more rapidly and reliably recovering from IT issues saves money that would otherwise be lost. As another common motto teaches, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

Veeam’s Cloud Data Management starts with ensuring successful backup and recovery, and then builds on it by unlocking additional capabilities… and therefore additional business and economic value. Looking at the other facets of Cloud Data Management:

The economic benefits of Cloud Mobility are both direct and indirect:

• Direct economic benefits further reduce downtime during migrations and disaster recovery, as those restoration windows (discussed earlier) are even shorter and more agile as workloads are relocated proactively (migration/mobility) or reactively (disaster recovery) to new hosting platforms.
• Indirect economic benefits are the reduced operating costs of moving from self-managed physical (or virtual) servers to a cloud-hosted infrastructure, or vice versa, based on ever-changing business requirements for where your data resides versus who in your organization needs access to it.

The economic benefits of Governance & Compliance include:

• Reduced or significantly mitigated impact of cyber-attacks and other malicious events, due to both reactively recovering non-compromised data but also proactively leveraging your data protection technologies to 1) test protected data for aberrations, 2) ensure recoveries are clean, and 3) aid in post-cyber forensics via quarantined DataLabs.

The economic benefits of Orchestration & Automation include:

• Reduced labor doing repetitive tasks related to patch testing, risk mitigation during application development/DevOps, or data mining/reporting — by scripting and orchestrating storage access to secondary copies for data re-use.
• Improved recovery (further reduced downtime) during crises by scripting recovery tasks, recurring testing of recovery plans, and increased success when crises actually happen.

For each of these, there are other potential economic benefits, but perhaps these will stimulate your imagination. Beyond the capabilities, it is important to also recognize that many of the value claims or savings expectations above have to be categorized as either hard or soft costs:

• Hard costs are those easily quantifiable or calculatable measures, such as downtime and data loss, which equates to either completely idle or the percent of encumbered employees (multiplied by their profitability contributions as well as their HR costs). This is explained in the “Calculating the Cost of Downtime” chapter in a Dummies book that I wrote last year: Data Protection by the Numbers for Dummies (use link to http://vee.am/DPN4d).
• Soft costs are often less immediately quantifiable, because they are less about “How much downtime do we have today versus what would we reduce by better recoverability?” and more about “What is the value to the business if we could ____________?” (fill in with automate X, enable Y, integrate with Z, etc.). Each of those initiatives does have value to the business, but requires that both the technical and business/operational stakeholders determine a perceived value that the organization would gain (or reduce loss) by implementing.

TCO and ROI can be “as much art as science” in truly understanding economic benefits of transformational IT technologies or methodologies. But hopefully this gets you started.

If you want to continue the conversation, ping me on Twitter as @JBuff.

Originally posted on Veeam.com Exec Blog

• It’s an unbiased survey of 1,550 enterprises (greater than 1,000 employees each) from around the world. Veeam contracted with a third-party analyst firm to conduct the blind survey so that Veeam could help our marketplace quantify and understand what organizations are struggling with and aspiring to achieve in data protection.
• The industry report is an unfiltered view on the data and its inferences into what IT and data protection look like today, including responses from both IT professionals and senior executives. You will also notice a few green side-bar boxes where the Veeam Product Managers added Veeam’s perspective to the report, as well.
• The data was interpreted, and the report authored, by two former industry analysts. My coauthor, Dave Russell (@BackupDave), was the lead author on the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Backup for years, while I (@JBuff) was the principal analyst for data protection at the Enterprise Strategy Group. We each have 30+ years in the data protection industry, starting as IT professionals, then developing backup products within the vendor community, later serving as industry analysts, and eventually joining Veeam; both as Vice Presidents of Strategy.

As an aside, Dave and I also host a weekly LinkedIn LiveStream called “Industry Insights” where one or both of us talk about industry research and news; again, with an unbiased perspective for the first 20 minutes and then a short Veeam perspective to close out the half hour. Check us out at LINK.

To me, the single, most interesting survey question was “Which of the following would drive your organization to change its primary backup solution to a new solution or service?“

The top answer to “Why change?” is RELIABILITY! Having been published by Veeam, whose tagline for years was “It Just Works,” this might appear self-serving. But since Veeam had no influence over the research panel or respondents, I would take it as validation. Customers want what they paid for — and in backup software, that means an assurance to restore. It would be like asking someone why they were changing cars and their answer being, “So that it gets me where I want to go.” If someone told me that, I would ask, “If your current car doesn’t get you where you want to go, why do you still have that car?“

The next drivers towards change can be summarized as #2 Economics (hardware costs, software costs, improved ROI/TCO) and #3 Better Outcomes (improved RPO/RTO SLAs, reduced complexity, ease of management). And of course, you cannot have an IT Modernization conversation without cloud services being part of it (#4 moving from on-prem to cloud-based protection). But according to the data, the cloud, better outcomes, nor economics matter, if it isn’t reliable.

That was one question out of the 40 that were asked in the survey. As former analysts, Dave and I stand by the blind approach that the survey was run through and the insights derived from its data. As Veeamers, we’re also happy that our products and services align with what many IT professionals and executives are seeking.

So please:

1. Download the “2020 Data Protection Trends” report
2. Consider how your organization lines up with the research trends
3. Ask yourself how you’d answer those same questions

And for bonus credit, don’t forget to check out our Industry Insights livestream on LinkedIn – Mondays at Noon Eastern US time.

If Dave or I can help you or you’d like to discuss the data, please find us on Twitter as @JBuff and @BackupDave. If you found the information useful, feel free to also comment below. As always, we’re here to help.

This article was originally posted on the Veeam Blog

• Innovation and differentiation in the marketplace
• Operational and economic benefits to customers
• Efficiencies and agilities gained
• Manageability and usability enhancements
• Scalability and automation capabilities
• Comprehensiveness of protection

There were bonus items for leveraging the Restful APIs that enable third-party solutions built upon the Veeam technology stack, as well as usage of Veeam’s DataLabs and orchestration capabilities. This year, four partner solutions were selected to receive VIAs at our VeeamON conference which was delivered June 17-18 and is available for on-demand viewing.

The 2020 Veeam Innovation Award partners are:

• IBM
• iland
• Managecast Technologies
• Offsite Data Sync

Veeam congratulates and thanks our four VIA winners, as well as the myriad other partners that deliver great solutions that are powered by Veeam technologies each and every day. Please check out the four 2020 VIA winners below:

• IBM Cloud has automated both Veeam Availability and Cloud Connect for our customers. Customers have Veeam Availability integrated into their Virtual Data Centers in a highly resilient and secure manner. VCCR is also enabled for customer replication and migration into their Virtual Data Centers. Veeam infrastructure is fully distributed across within a Multi-Zone Region, while utilizing V10 to provide a secondary copy in a different region. We have deployed all of Veeam in a Highly Available manner, that if the DC where the Veeam Portal becomes unavailable, VMware will automatically recognize it and activate it in an available DC.
• iland Test Drive is an automated cloud service trial platform that enables Veeam customers and partners to easily evaluate Veeam’s Backup and Recovery software with iland Secure Cloud BaaS and DRaaS. Test Drive was designed to reduce the time and effort needed to deploy and validate Veeam solutions in a fully-functioning, VMware-based cloud environment. With just a few clicks, customers can experience the actual look, feel, features, and capabilities of Veeam and iland Cloud services together, as well as ensure iland’s performance, management, security, and cost metrics meet business expectations, before committing to a contract.
• AutoRecover by OffsiteDataSync is an automation tool for customers to restore their backups directly to vCloud director for disaster recovery, testing, validation, compliance initiatives. Using the OffsiteDataSync portal to look at backup chains, select the appropriate restore points/VMs to restore and initiates restore. AutoRecover automatically 1) Builds out private vCloud director environment, 2) Imports backups, and 3) Initiates restore. When completed, an email is received with information on connecting to the new environment. After, the environment is automatically torn down. AutoRecover isn’t just for backup testing, it can be used in a declared disaster situation allowing customers self-service recovery of systems for easy and secure services restoration.
• The Managecast platform is a comprehensive Veeam monitoring portal built for service providers, consultants, and end-users to help monitor daily Veeam backups.  Managecast provides long-term historical trending of backup jobs and repositories,  Ticketing integration, Tracking of jobs that have not run, Tracking loss of connection with VBR consoles (losing contact with Veeam Management Agent), High-level dashboard showing backup activities, Fully multi-tenant and MSP enabled to allow third parties to track their client’s backups, Acknowledgement and tracking of events (who, and when and any related notifications to clients), and Anomaly detection (when backups go outside of “normal”, such as excessive or decreased backup data).

During VeeamON, registered participants were able to read aтd watch a summary of each of the four VIA winning solutions and then vote on a “Best of Show” for VeeamON 2020. This year, we are proud to announce that IBM has been voted on as the Best of Show among the 2020 VIA partner solutions – congratulations IBM!

This article was originally posted on the Veeam Blog.

Reliable Restore-ability

The most basic need of any data protection scenario is the assured ability to recover your data. If you aren’t confident in your ability to reliably recover your data, then the DP solution has no purpose at all.

The answer to this need is better backups … but not just backups, but combining backups with snapshots and replication. And doing that for your workloads that are physical servers on premises, virtual machines on-prem and cloud-hosted, as well as native cloud software. Wherever your workloads are today (or will be six months from now), the requirements to protect them persevere. 

Ask yourself “Can I reliably restore my stuff ?”  And just like Maslow’s Needs, until you address this foundation, you really can’t move up the stack.

Data Survivability

Get your data out of the building! For the last 30 years, that has meant tape for many of us. Today, many are leaping into clouds … but please, get your data out of the building. I do want to point out that “the cloud” does not and should not entirely replace or kill tape. In most organizations, 85%+ of your data does not have long-term requirements.

• Yes, you should keep versions of almost everything for perhaps a year or so, to mitigate cyber-attacks and folks that overwrite last year’s stuff with this year’s – so maybe 15 months.
• There is a good amount of data that really could have unlockable value – so for data mining and analytics, I could foresee 2, 3, up to 5 year retention using the cloud
• For 10+ year retention, for what might be 5-10% of your data that actually has mandates related to long term retention or regulatory compliance (patient lifespans, patent/research histories, executive and legal directives, etc. … TAPE, long-lasting, portable, durable, modern tape. 

Now if you (or your boss’s boss) truly doesn’t like tape – then maybe consider a cloud service provider that will do a monthly tape for you? Else, send everything to a cloud (or two). At the end of the day, get your data out of the building, so that your data survives … so that you have a better chance of ensuring that your business survives.

BC/DR — Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

There are at least four aspects of BC/DR to consider:

DR and BC aren’t the same. DR is taking the survivable data and the reliable restore-ability and executing it somewhere else … whereas BC focuses first and foremost on the business processes. Real BC/DR is grounded in understanding the business processes and correlating their dependencies on IT systems.

Planning & Expertise: Understanding and quantifying operational processes, IT dependencies, business impacts, etc. is critical. That expertise likely won’t come from your Backup Admin, so seek outside expertise that can objectively help you understand your processes and then plan to mitigate IT interruptions accordingly.

Preparedness: recognize that if a server was running in Dallas, but now it’s been spun up in Boston or just in “some cloud,” the users won’t just reconnect. Networking, especially with cloud-hosted DRaaS, but really any multi-site topology, requires connectivity that necessitates significant pre-planning and testing. Do not underestimate this.

BC/DR is NOT just about earthquakes and fires, its about continuity of operations. Most interruptions of IT service can actually be foreseen in platform migrations. IT wants to move your servers from physical to virtual, from Dallas to Boston, from HyperV to VMware, or from on-prem to cloud-hosted … they are all server moves, which (left to old-school methods) will result in outages … albeit planned outages. Instead, think of migrations, including P2V, V2C, or C2V as all being interruptions to your business… so your agility to mitigate downtime by using those same rapid and reliable recovery mechanisms that would recover from a flooded server room can enable you to move from your data center to a cloud … or in between clouds … or back on-prem again. Otherwise, you are creating your own outages; don’t do that.

Orchestrated Workflows

When we get past tactical restorability and the assurance of survivability … you start to see a lot of process-centric capabilities that are encompassed within BC/DR. Here is the problem, humans are not good at repetitive tasks – especially complex repetitive tasks.

So, get the humans out of the way. Humans are great at defining strategy, establishing goals, and creating the process steps. After that, you should be looking for orchestration where you can develop workflows for each of those recovery tasks … then orchestrate running those recovery workflows on a regular basis … and deriving reports that identify what is working and what needs improvement … that is where humans can get involved again.

Data Re-Use

In Maslow’s hierarchy, the top of the pyramid is Self-Actualization … becoming the best possible you. In this pyramid, the pinnacle (the best possible) Data Protection is Data Management.

The first four layers are a great set of capabilities, and frankly those outcomes are better that what most organizations have today. But that level of investment in effort and planning and hardware and software has a cost. The ROI of most legacy approaches to data protection were to simply quantify downtime and data loss … and then compare that with the cost of the data protection hardware, software, services, and labor. Any way you look at it, it’s a big investment; but what if you could do more?

• You already have a data protection solution that can reliably recover your data.
• You can recover your data to a location other than where the data typically resides.
• You can automate the connectivity to that data and orchestrate tasks.

So, what if you did those orchestrated restores into a sandbox (a test area) that wasn’t visible to the production network? Automate bringing the data in and enabling connectivity to the secondary instance, so that now, others have access to a benign copy of the data while the production data continues unscathed?

• You could test patches or new application versions without affecting production. If the new build breaks the test environment, you’ll be glad that you didn’t roll it out.
• You could enable DevOps to test their applications with live data. Every morning, they come into work and yesterday’s live data is ready for them to play with.
• You could provide access to AI/ML or other data mining tools.
• You could provide access to regulatory compliance auditors.

This applies to any scenario where you are enabling others to do their jobs better, because they now have access to production data without affecting the production environment. Every one of those scenarios creates business value because it creates a positive benefit to the business. Now, your ROI for data protection is not “just” the mitigation of downtime and data loss, but also the acceleration to the business with these new capabilities.

Like in Maslow’s Pyramid, where you often can’t be who you want to be if you don’t first meet some foundational needs, you can’t get to the data management that you want, without first addressing the foundational needs of data protection.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Enjoy the video – and please let me know what you think.

• World Backup Day 2015 — WBD should be like Mothers’ Day (every-day)
• World Backup Day 2012 — WBD is the excuse you need to try to do better

A version of this video text was later published as an article on LinkedIn

Said with some sarcasm and hyperbole, even though we may be just faceless and interchangeable subscriber IDs to (some) cloud providers, you should not think of cloud providers as faceless or interchangeable facilitators of data protection. There is more to look for. Here is a video based on some quantitative and qualitative research that I conducted as an industry analyst prior to my time at Veeam:

I am hopeful that this series gave you some new things to look at. If you missed any, here is the rest of the series:

1. Backup is not a destination
2. Do you have a ‘reality gap’ in your IT strategy?
3. Why downtime is not (just) an IT problem
4. Why ‘cloud’ and ‘reliability’ are driving IT changes into 2020
5. Which cloud should you use for data protection and why

Next month, Dave Russell (@BackupDave) and I kick off another series of former-analyst perspectives to help you on your journey into 2020. If I can help you in the meantime, ping me as @JBuff.

Thanks for watching.

This article was originally posted on the Veeam Blog.

For the next two weeks, we’ll cover “what to look for in a solution” — using industry analysts’ research. Check out the video to get started:

As mentioned, in the video: Reliability & Using the Cloud top the list, but there is more to it than that.

Improving reliability (and confidence) tops the list. When I talk to enterprises, it’s the number one reason that Veeam has been invited into the meeting; because IT or senior management is not confident (or has proven bad experiences) with their existing backup solution. In the video, you will see a two-slide “sales pitch” of IDC data showing where “confidence/reliability” scored among other reasons why organizations initially chose Veeam and then later what they actually got after Veeam was in.

The cloud also ranks high on the list in a few variations, and that does give an interesting meta point.  Unlike many of the IT drivers of technologies for the past decade, there isn’t a single “hero” scenario when it comes to cloud-based services and capabilities. In the past, many organizations might choose their data protection solution based on a feature or some unique capability with a key workload. Instead, when folks want to use “the cloud,” it is a misnomer because there isn’t one kind of cloud, even as it relates to data protection. Hence, you’ll see a flowchart in the video that unpacks the various clouds and their considerations for inclusion within your strategy.

It is not a coincidence that some organizations are looking to replace their legacy IT server-based services with cloud-based services as one way to improve reliability, including:

• Modernizing production workloads with SaaS that are natively durable (e.g. Office 365). Though it’s important to note that “durable” only addresses availability outages that are caused by failed components, which is mitigated by geo-replicated SaaS. That approach, while good, does not reduce your requirements for previous versions to avoid business impacts related to data loss, retention/compliance mandates, or simply the deletion or over-writing of data.
• Expanding modern infrastructure with IaaS that extends on-premises virtualization infrastructure (e.g. VMware or Hyper-V) with hypervisor-esque hosting architectures in Amazon or Azure that enables relatively seamless hybrid-deployments with VMs able to migrate between hosting platforms or locations based on the business.
• Modernizing protection capabilities with backup (BaaS) or disaster-recovery (DRaaS) of both on-premises and cloud-based production workloads, including the BaaS and/or DRaaS of IaaS VMs or SaaS offerings. (it’s okay if you have to read that acronym soup a second time)

Putting it all together, it is impossible for IT organizations that are looking ahead to not foresee cloud-based capabilities being part of their hybrid-IT strategy; likely in more than one way, giving us the term multi-cloud. But each and every cloud, used for both protection and production, will have significant ramifications on IT’s ability to deliver what the business units expect; namely, reliable and resilient assured access to the data that they rely on every day.

If you’ve missed the earlier episodes in this Tuesdays in October series, check them out below:

1. Backup is not a destination
2. Do you have a ‘reality gap’ in your IT strategy?
3. Why downtime is not (just) an IT problem
4. Why ‘cloud’ and ‘reliability’ are driving IT changes into 2020
5. Which cloud should you use for data protection and why

Come back next week, as we wrap up the series with “Which cloud should you use for data protection and why.” As always, thanks for watching — and if I (or Veeam) can be of any help, please reach out to me at @JBuff.

This article was originally posted on the Veeam Blog.