The main drivers of change in the business information technology (IT) industry will be the significant growth and use of cloud and mobile applications and these are also the areas that will see the most focus for data management, protection and disaster recovery, says data protection and availability company Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev.
Disaster recovery in the cloud will become mainstream as companies use the cloud in disaster recovery scenarios to recover their mission critical data and applications and to ensure their cloud systems can be recovered to ensure uninterrupted functioning of the business.
Best practice data management and backup are also driving the adoption and use of virtualisation technologies, which enable the centralised management of distributed data repositories, as more elements of business systems become software-defined and, thus, increasingly divorced from the underlying hardware infrastructure.
Software-defined IT elements also enable their movement between data repositories, as hardware becomes increasingly commoditised.
Veeam product strategy head Doug Hazelman notes that Veeam's backup testing capabilities are also providing companies with effective virtual laboratories to test the acceptance and performance of applications and patches prior to deploying them into the live production environment.
"Veeam's backup testing functionality enables users to leverage their backup data to improve their new deployments in an environment that replicates their live production environments."
US cyber security and antivirus major Trend Micro has used Veeam's testing capabilities to find and fix minor and major bugs in its releases prior to deploying updates, enabling Trend Micro to maintain a high rate of robust updates and releases to users, Trend Micro Ireland IT director William Dalton explains.
End-users are modernising their data centre infrastructure, while also using their existing infrastructure, to be able to cope with the rapid growth in data flowing in and out of organisations.
"This exponential growth of data, with data in large enterprises expected to double every five years or even every two years, means that backup systems and architectures must be more flexible and agile to ensure that data is managed effectively and efficiently and the right data protection is applied to the required data to meet regulations and customer expectations for data availability, while still enabling companies to maintain performance and costs," says technology and market research company Forrester Research infrastructure and operations senior analyst Henry Baltazar.
Schalk Burger is a guest of Veeam at its inaugural Veeam-On conference in Las Vegas, in the US.