4 Data Backup and Recovery Trends Storage Players Must Be Aware Of

The global data backup and recovery market size is expected to grow from USD
7.13 billion in 2018 to USD 11.59 billion by 2025, a CAGR of 10.2% during the forecast period.

This reaffirms the fact that data is now a strategic business asset and companies are compelled to allocate significant budgets to preserve and protect it. This is also pushing companies to embrace new concepts of data storage. Enterprises are looking to store greater volumes of data. They are looking for the ability to access it faster when they need it. They want to reset to a meaningful status should something go wrong with the data. And they are conscious of the costs associated with achieving all that. Of course, these are only the most obvious in a complex basket of business requirements enterprises have of their data backup and recovery solutions. 

In search of the perfect data backup and recovery solution, enterprises are pushing their vendors to innovate and scale. Here’s what’s coming up and some solutions that are already here:

Hybrid Cloud

We don’t live in a perfect world. Each storage environment has its flaws. Public cloud may be one of the most cost-effective solutions for its purpose, but it is not thought advisable to store business workloads or any other kind of sensitive data in the public cloud. Enterprises have compliance and security complications to factor in and the public cloud scores poorly on these parameters. Private cloud is expensive, on the other hand, and may not be feasible for firms that are low on budget.

Hybrid cloud aims to strike a balance in such situations. It combines the benefits associated with public private, and on-premise solutions. According to Gartner, a shift to the hybrid cloud is on the rise over the last couple of years. The attraction of hybrid cloud is growing as a disaster recovery solution. Enterprises also gain the advantage of adopting the 3-2-1 rule of backup data protection (3 separate backup copies on 2 types of media and 1 copy offsite).

DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service

Disaster recovery is complicated. The complexity escalates with growing data volumes and business considerations like multiple locations, the criticality of processes, and onerous compliance needs. In such situations, DRaaS can be a viable solution. A DRaaS strategy can eliminate the complexities of implementing a DR solution in organizations. This makes it a lucrative option for SMBs, who don’t have the time, money, and skilled resources to build and implement a comprehensive DR solution.

Automation

Ok, we know this is not really new. The days of manual backup left Enterprises long ago (didn’t they?). Most organizations have some form of automated process to backup and store data. But there’s always something new happening here.

With potential security breaches looming large, it has become important to automate every critical backupprocess out there. A visible trend is that of going for appliance-based backup with cloud storage. This ensures that automatic back-ups take place so that the cloud data can be restored no matter what happens to it. This allows critical data to be backed up to numerous data centers. Enterprises can, therefore, restore anything anytime irrespective of who uploaded what and when.

This is what helps firms take control of their critical business data. At the same time, they enjoy scalability and cost-effectiveness. This can prevent data loss and downtime. Restoring data, when needed, could also be significantly accelerated.

Artificial Intelligence

When we are talking about the future of data backup and recovery, AI or Artificial Intelligence must find mention. AI already plays a crucial role in the designing and ongoing management of data centers and the products that reside there. To begin with, AI helps cut down inefficiencies in the server usage by distributing workloads across servers. Similarly, AI can also reduce power consumption without impacting the performance adversely by spinning up disks when needed and shutting others down when not. Most importantly, it can enhance security by helping monitor the systems 24/7 and protect it fro threats. AI can also make significant changes in DR solutions and enhance them. For instance, AI could predict when a system might fail or be attacked. Such proactive insights could drive fundamentally new DR strategies in enterprises and their demands from the DR products that serve them.

Data Backup and Recovery solutions underwent a transformation with the arrival of the Cloud. But as we have seen over the last few years, the needs of enterprises are also continuously evolving. What worked well yesterday will no longer be sufficient tomorrow. The demands enterprises are making of their data backup and disaster recovery solutions are similarly rising. The companies that make these products and solutions have the mandate to innovate fast. As we have just seen, that innovation is taking these solutions down some familiar and some fashionably new paths. It’s an exciting time to be a data backup product!