The Top BDR Trends Of 2015 (And Beyond)

By The Business Solutions Network

Four experts weigh in on how the ever-expanding data universe and customers’ need for business continuity is shaping backup and disaster recovery (BDR) technology and best practices.

A June 2014 study released by the Business Forward Foundation, titled Severe Weather And Manufacturing In America, uncovered some pretty scary trends. First, natural disasters are on the rise. In the 1980s, for example, the United States experienced 20 weather disasters. The following decade saw 47, and in the first decade of the 2000s there were 48. Between 2010 and 2014, 36 weather disasters occurred, more than double the pace of the previous two decades. At the same time, IT downtime is becoming more costly. For example, in the study mentioned above, shutting down an auto assembly line costs the plant $1.25 million per hour! These factors alone confirm the importance of backup and disaster recovery as well as business continuity solutions and services.

BDR vendors are well aware of these trends and opportunities, and many have made big strides in minimizing downtime. Experts from CloudBerry Lab, Datto, StorageCraft, and VaultLogix offer their advice on the top BDR trends for 2015 and beyond.

The Data Universe Is Expanding
Data is being created at mind-bending pace. “According to research from EMC, ‘the digital universe is doubling in size every two years and will multiply tenfold between 2013 and 2020 — from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion gigabytes,’” says Tim Hannibal, senior vice president of cloud solutions at VaultLogix, an Intercloud Systems Company.

Ian McChord, VP of product management at Datto, concurs and adds, “Customers’ data used to reside primarily on their LANs, but not anymore. Now, it’s on their mobile devices, the computer they use when they work from home, and it’s in their file, sync, and share and other cloud-based apps. This is an important trend because IT solutions providers need to consider how they’re going to protect all their customers’ data and which vendor(s) can help them do that most efficiently and cost-effectively.”

Another important result of this trend is the need to prioritize data, says Hannibal. “MSPs (managed services providers) can provide a lot more value to their customers if they understand this principle and can offer a service that treats mission-critical data different from data that merely has to be archived for compliance purposes,” he says.

BDR TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership) Shows Signs Of Plateauing
A side effect of the expanding data universe, combined with companies’ growing reliance on data and IT systems, has made backup and recovery more complex. In the past, there were lots of BDR vendors that specialized in one or two backup areas. This meant that a VAR or MSP had to select as many as six different vendors to create a comprehensive solution that offered local file backups; image backups; virtual machine backups; cloud backups; mobile device backups; file, sync, and share; and additional products if the company needed to back up Apple products or SQL databases. “We’re seeing VARs and MSPs moving away from vendors selling niche backup services,” says McChord. “Bundled BDR solutions are easier for IT solutions providers to sell, implement, and manage, which ultimately leads to a lower TCO for the end user and better profit margins for resellers.” The Top BDR Trends Of 2015 (And Beyond) By Jay McCall, editor Four experts weigh in on how the ever-expanding data universe and customers’ need for business continuity is shaping backup and disaster recovery (BDR) technology and best practices. Alexander Negrash, marketing director Matt Urmston, director of product management Ian McChord, VP of product management Tim Hannibal, senior vice president of cloud solutions."

Cloud Backup Is Becoming The Norm For SMBs
Although the term cloud computing was first coined in 2006, it would be at least four years later until it made it on most companies’ radar. “Prior to the cloud, off-site backup required sending tapes or disks to a warehouse, which made disaster recovery very time-consuming,” says Alexander Negrash, marketing director at CloudBerry Lab. “Today, cloud is providing organizations with an inexpensive offsite target for backup data and, depending on the type of service one chooses, that data can be accessed quickly, too.”

This has been especially beneficial for SMBs, which need the same backup protection as enterprises, but oftentimes didn’t have the financial or human resources to perform proper off-site backups in the past. “Just a few years ago, MSPs would have had to build out their own infrastructures to provide backup as a service,” says Negrash. “Today, they can leverage the vast resources of a public cloud provider to power their backup as service offerings.”

Recovery Times Reach New Lows
Advances in virtualization technology are playing a key role in BDR’s progress, too, says Matt Urmston, director of product management at StorageCraft. “Microsoft has made the decision to capture market share by giving away its Hyper-V hypervisor for free. This has had a significant impact on making virtualization, a technology once reserved only for large enterprises, now available for even the smallest businesses.”

Virtualization is also enabling MSPs to become more competitive with their clients’ RTOs (recovery time objectives) and RPOs (recovery point objectives). “MSPs can create virtual disks in real time even as backups are occurring,” says Urmston. “Even if 1 TB of data is being backed up, what used to take hours to write to a physical disk now takes only minutes.”

Datto’s McChord concurs and adds, “Virtual machines also can quickly be spun up without time-consuming conversion processes or the hardware limitations of a physical image backup and restore. The industry is approaching high availability, which is where there’s barely any disruption experienced when switching from the main computing environment to the backup environment.”

Predicting BDR’s Future
According to McChord, compliance laws will have a big impact on BDR’s future. “Our legal department continues to grow each year, and it’s largely due to the need to ensure our product complies with industry regulations like HIPAA, PCI (Payment Card Industry), and FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). It’s important, too, that we keep our partners informed about these regulations and the best ways to protect their customers’ data.”

Security issues are another theme shaping BDR’s future, says StorageCraft’s Urmston. “Cyberattacks have become very insidious over the past couple of years, making it more challenging for MSPs to protect their customers’ IT environments. If an end user succumbs to a cyberattack that encrypts its data and renders it useless — as is the case with a ransomware attack — performing a data recovery is the most viable option.”

As more companies are moving their data and IT infrastructures to the cloud, Urmston predicts we’ll see another trend emerge in the near future: cloud-to-cloud backup. “Let’s say, for instance, that a company is moving its IT infrastructure to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and running Office 365. To avoid having all of its resources tied to a single vendor — and a single point of failure — the client may opt to back up its resources to a third-party cloud provider.”

Whether the decision to use multiple cloud providers is driven by industry regulations, the occurrence of natural disasters, or cyberattacks, cloud-to-cloud backup will become an important trend in the future. And at the rate and severity each of these three threat areas is growing, it’s reasonable to think that we’ll see this happen in the near future.