In ESG’s soon-to-be-released research on IT Spending Priorities for 2010, “improving backup and recovery” is the third most important IT priority in the next 12-18 months—behind “server virtualization” and “security” initiatives, and just ahead of “upgrading network infrastructure” and “managing data growth.”  In addition, “improving backup and recovery of virtual machines” was the #2 priority within top server virtualization initiatives for 2010—up from #4 in a similar survey published last year.  The bottom line? Backup is broken.

It’s not that backup applications or tape and disk storage don’t work, it’s more that they either were not designed or are not able to keep pace with today’s data growth and availability demands.  IT organizations have been propping up vulnerabilities with strategies like disk-assisted backup/recovery and snapshot capture to make things tolerable.  Or they’re choosing wholesale replacement of existing backup solutions (this is often the case in server virtualization environments where inefficiencies are really exposed with traditional approaches).

Quantitative and anecdotal research, however, confirms that most companies are complacent or paralyzed with backup.  Let’s face it: once it’s in place, it’s hard to displace.  It’s not the acquisition costs of switching.  Nope.  It’s process change. There’s a big investment in establishing policies and processes, and in training the staff to manage it all.  And then there’s the disruption that accompanies new backup implementations.  This is a major driver for companies to wait for a new rollout or refresh of an OS, hypervisor, or application.

So what does that mean for end-users in 2010?  If you’ve got a refresh or new rollout planned (Exchange 2010, vSphere 4, Windows Server 2008 r2, Windows 7, or SharePoint 2010, to name a few), think about the implications for data protection early (for example, source-side deduplication in backup and continuous data protection approaches are ideal for virtual machine backup).  If your budget can handle it, bite the bullet to optimize backup and recovery in conjunction with the deployment rather than after.

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Tags: backup, recovery