Backup used to be easy. Well, maybe it was never easy, but with hindsight it sure looks like it used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. The age-old problem with backup has been the volume of data that needs to be copied, an issue that kept backup admins awake at night wondering if their backup app would exceed the backup window and spill over into the workday.
The volume part of the problem has been well addressed, with continuous data backup snapshots and other remedies providing a toolkit to manage data volumes.
The factor that has turned backup on its ear is more about data sources than volumes. They may be created or modified and reside in multiple places, both geographically and technologically. A typical mid-sized enterprise will have a data center, several branch offices, employees who work from home and workers who spend most of their time on the road. That’s already a lot of data creation and storage locations to manage and protect, and IoT is just going to make matters worse.
In a recent IoT Analytics report, 6 IoT adoption trends for 2022, the analyst firm noted that its top trend was “IoT adoption is accelerating.” The report added that “79% of organizations are planning to invest significant amounts of money into at least one IoT project in the coming two years.”
That kind of IoT growth is likely to put pressure on existing data protection frameworks. Consider how vast an IoT infrastructure may be, and how varied its endpoints could be, ranging from simple sensors that gather data a few bits at a time to full-fledged computers that churn out data in megabyte chunks.
Regardless of how your service supports clients’ data protection efforts, the multiple-data-sources challenges will tax their backup and disaster recovery efforts. If it hasn’t happened already, it will soon enough.
The best solution, of course, is to reduce the number of data repositories that need to be protected and to consolidate data protection processes. If your client uses cloud storage or cloud-based SaaS apps, that might determine the most efficient strategy.
IoT applications often rely on with analysis done in the cloud—so the data is already there. Data crated by remote workers and branch offices can be automatically backed up to cloud resources. Home office applications and users will likely back up to a data center resource—which can then be replicated to the cloud. And SaaS applications, although nominally protected by the software vendor, can be protected using cloud-to-cloud capabilities of backup applications.
The ability to maintain business operations in spite of malware and disastrous disruptions can give businesses of any size the edge over competitors. The Business Continuity Center provides blogs, resources and information to help solution providers learn more about backup and disaster recovery trends.
The management, protection, and recovery solutions. Recently the company merged with which provides exceptional solutions to protect digital assets of organizations in need of comprehensive data protection.
Todd is a former business newspaper journalist who now writes cover topics in the Channel. He has worked on a wide range of Partner marketing programs for SMB and enterprise clients in the B2B market.
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