Over the last six months a slew of new products aimed at small to midsize businesses and consumers have come to market and analysts report that the data backup space will continue to expand over the next three years, growing to over $300 million by 2009. So what will drive Continuous Data Protection (CDP) adoption in 2007?
Increased understanding
While the CDP market is still defining itself, many businesses are challenged with deciding which CDP solution best fits their needs. Customers also have an option to choose between online backup services that require the handover of personal information and physical backup solutions such as external hard drives.
With numerous backup choices available today, businesses and consumers often are not able to differentiate one solution from the other. This confusion is further exacerbated by the fact that many vendors are passing their solutions off as CDP, when in reality, they only offer "near continuous" or “snapshot” technology that still requires the user to schedule and activate the software and captures only the current version of files. However, with the manner and speed in which data is constantly updated today, organizations need to realize that “frequent backup” is definitely not a solution to their problems.
Truly continuous data protection software provides real-time data backup by continuously safeguarding information from data loss caused by computer viruses, file corruption, accidental deletion and theft. A proper CDP solution acts as a “data safety net” capturing and saving changes to documents instantaneously on the local machine and sending a copy of the information to a backup target such as a network or external hard drive for double protection—all within milliseconds. As CDP technology advances it should be viewed not only as an “absolutely continuous” solution but also as a “network aware” and “on-machine/ off-machine” total computer data protection solution.
Life on the road
One of the major drivers of CDP adoption is the ever growing mobile workforce. Increasingly, employees are working remotely and during extended and different periods of the day. Gartner predicts that in 2007 there will be over 60 million people teleworking worldwide. Additionally, the World Wide Web has enabled businesses to spread their reach globally, making them available 24 hours and seven days a week. Think back. Previously only senior management and sales staff had laptops, but now you probably do too.
Analysts tell us that nearly 80 percent of small business' critical data now resides on laptops. With this mobility and intermittent connectivity, businesses are finding it more difficult to implement traditional backup solutions. A CDP solution is the perfect answer for the mobile worker because it provides laptops with a continuous data backup solution regardless of network connectivity, and can transparently re-sync with a network once the computer is reconnected.
Today’s mobile worker is very much in tune with the value of having continuous protection of their documents. The value of the employee work day is too high to accept up to 12 hours of “work loss”, assuming a nightly backup was even in place. Forrester Research claims that over half of all computer users have lost computer files, and 33 percent of them never recovered their lost data. Studies also show that of user’s who lose work during the day, for example, a marketing document or program source file, the sense of emotional loss means that 70 percent won’t even bother to recreate and 25 percent will not invest the same amount of time or energy in the new output. Businesses now need backup solutions that provide continuous protection in order to maintain costs and stay competitive.
Cautious mindset
In the era of Sarbanes Oxley, compliance is another factor that will drive CDP adoption over the next year. Many small businesses don’t know what documents need to be saved and for how long, and are often confused as to how compliance mandates will affect them. In addition, some businesses might not be required to save all end-user material, but may simply want to have a copy of important documentation as part of their company’s best-practices, digital inventory or intellectual property.
Most businesses will need an end-point backup in place because they can’t take existing backup solutions and hammer them into a new box suitable for increased storage loads. We are already seeing new products, startups and service providers creating backup solutions for this space.
Price pressures
Cost will play a big role in pushing CDP adoption over the next year. The decreasing cost of storage and the rise of storage space are driving companies to save great volumes of material locally. However, onsite local storage is also dramatically increasing the risk and exposure to data loss. As a result we will see an uptake of CDP deployments by businesses and customers looking for a solution that can continuously back up data to external offsite locations.
Conclusion
2007 will bring unprecedented growth for continuous data protection solutions. Businesses, employees and consumers alike are becoming more and more accustomed to being able to roll-back changes in applications. People expect that they can uncommit to just about any electronic document from a Microsoft Office file to a bank statement. They want to be able to go back 5 minutes or an hour, or 20 days within any document they created. We will begin to see more non traditional technology companies pushing existing continuous data protection services as they realize how important it is to their business. As storage costs continue to drop and factors such as mobility, productivity and compliance continue to increase, we will witness more and more businesses adopting true CDP solutions.
biography
Chris Stakutis is IBM's CTO for emerging storage software and inventor of IBM’s Continuous Data Protection for Files software. Chris has over a dozen patents in data storage management. He is also a published author of two data and storage related books.
