Though organisations are faced with ever-increasing volumes of data, budgeting for data protection is one of the biggest challenges.
So says Kelly Brown, senior director, worldwide regional and channel marketing at EMC's Data Protection and Availability Division. "Budget is always a challenge. In spite of increased data volumes, typically IT budgets are not increasing at the same rate - they may be flat or even shrinking compared with years past," says Brown.
She is of the view that this makes it necessary to show the return to the business for investments into data protection.
Another trend putting pressure on data protection is the fact that application decisions and even purchases are being made outside of IT by lines of business, Brown says. "Without IT involvement, there is no guarantee that the appropriate data protection is in place to protect the application and the data.
"This is why EMC is investing in data protection for hybrid cloud environments, providing a level of visibility and control across workloads that may be on premise or in the cloud. Regarding where the applications are located, a strategy must be in place to ensure appropriate SLAs for application availability and data protection."
According to Brown, an ongoing trend is the ability to support the sheer volume of data created. She notes that not all applications are of equal importance in the organisation, and it is important that data protection strategy matches the value of the application and the associated data. A "one-size-fits-all" data protection approach doesn't work across all workloads within an organisation, she adds.
Another trend is the shift towards hybrid cloud, she says, pointing out that this means companies may have some workloads on premise in the data centre, while others may be in the cloud.
From a data protection approach, she says, the question is how to ensure there is an appropriate data protection strategy in place and to make sure SLAs are met.
Increasingly, as IT may not be part of some of the decisions on cloud-based services, it is important that line-of-business owners also factor data protection as part of their criteria to evaluate different service providers, she adds.
"This also leads to a third trend, around accessibility. More applications are expected to be always available through an increasing number of mobile devices."
She reveals that with this expectation of the always on business, it puts pressure on the data protection team to ensure the applications are available around the clock.
"For example, the time when an application could be unavailable because of the backup process is a thing of the past. On the whole, data protection needs to be done in the background without interrupting access."
Brown is of the view that South African companies understand the importance of protecting their key applications and data.
She believes that companies can gain a competitive advantage if they have the appropriate data protection strategy in place - ensuring applications are always available and data is protected.
"As we've seen in past research, systems downtime and data loss can result in loss of customer confidence, delays in bringing new products to market and loss of business to the competition. South African companies that are keen to stay ahead of the competition will include data protection as a key element within their technology infrastructure."
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