Organisations continue to grapple with the challenge of exponential data growth. Along with escalating data volumes, the complexity of protecting these vast data resources is rising.

Sumash Singh, business unit manager: backup recovery systems of EMC Southern Africa, says companies are also starting to appreciate the value of their data.

“It’s not just about volumes anymore,” he says. “To tackle these challenges, organisations need to adopt more robust backup technologies, and I believe we will see a shift from direct provisioning to backup-as-a-service.”

Providing backups as a service enables the customer organisation to choose the level of service and then marry the backup solution to its requirements.

By setting a baseline technology framework, the customer can exploit the best of the technologies available to meet their various requirements.

According to Singh, this represents a transformational shift. “It will be so easy. Companies will be able to log on, request a backup application service, and then map the most appropriate backup technology to it. It’s a self-service way of provisioning – basically backup on demand.”

The early adopters of this transformed backup will be the service providers, who typically act as the pioneers of how technology vendors are moulding their developments to address the needs and challenges of the IT community and their customers. Commenting on how soon organisations can expect backup-as-a-service to become a reality, Singh says most technology vendors already have the building blocks in place.

“The crucial next step is to make transformational backup applications as easy as traditional backup solutions,” he points out.

With its industry-leading portfolio, EMC has the building blocks customers require. Deep integration of EMC’s backup and recovery products allows customers to address a broad range of requirements and challenges as they architect new data protection infrastructures. With products like EMC Avamar, Data Domain, Data Protection Advisor and NetWorker integrated via DD Boost software, EMC customers have an unmatched ability to optimise their data protection infrastructures for faster backup and recovery, multiple workloads and many application types while eliminating silos of redundant processes and management complexities.

“The goal is to keep it as simple as possible,” Singh says. “It should be as straightforward as: How much backup do you want, for how long, what data do you want to keep, and who has access rights? Also, the entire process should be completely transparent and hidden from the end customer. That is the technology evolution for the next 12 months.”

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