Originating Author: Steve Kenniston
The backup market is consistently a $2+ billion dollar market. Every year people look to build or add on to existing backup solutions. With the advent of disk-based backup solutions and technologies that support a multitude of environments, it is time to take a step back and start asking the questions: "What am I really trying to accomplish?" "Am I really backing up data, or am I protecting data?" "Which data is most important in my environment?" "What is the value of that data?"
Now that IT is 100% accountable for 100% of the data that lives within its business, it is imperative that IT start asking these tough questions. Once this is done, and ONLY once these questions have answers, can you start to answer more important questions such as, "What are my RTO and RPO objectives for this 'type' of data?"
It is this part of the conversation that will lead you to the right technology solution, whether it be data deduplication, VTL, disk-based backup, replication, etc. Each of these technologies is robust enough and has been in the market long enough that many vendors have excellent products to solve each of your challenges. The trick is know what you need, not what you want.
Action Item: The call to action is for IT to take the time to meet with the lines-of-business to have a hard conversation about the expectations of data availability. It is also important to let the LOBs understand that every improvement in RPO and RTO has an associated dollar cost and to help them decide the value of their data. The follow-on steps will be to meet with the vendors and acquire the right solution to meet everyone's SLA.
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