Top Data Protection Predictions for 2014

Prediction No. 1: The evolution of disaster recovery as a service will take center stage.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) was a major trend in 2013, and, in 2014, we’ll see this phenomenon evolve in several ways:

• DRaaS services will evolve to become faster and even more efficient with virtualization technologies to optimize infrastructure server and storage needs and meet customers’ recovery point objectives (RPOs), recovery time objectives (RTOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs).
• DRaaS will also become more self-service oriented to give more control to midmarket customers, as well as additional flexibility to drive their disaster recovery practices.

Demand for the integration of local on-premise backup solutions with cloud-based archiving and recovery will increase. Companies will continue to increase their virtual footprint, as well as their desire to back up locally to ensure the most secure and rapid backup and recovery possible. Thus, we will see a growing trend of harmonizing local on-premise backup solutions with cloud-based archiving and recovery. As a result, cloud archiving to customers’ choice of backup sites (AWS, Google, OpenStack-based storage clouds and Rackspace) will emerge. Additionally, the combination of cloud-based archiving and DRaaS will allow virtualization spin up in the cloud to ensure the reliability of data and systems being recovered.