Insight

2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey

December 1, 2020

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Enterprise Strategy Group

This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on 2021 IT budget expectations, technology initiatives and priorities, year over year spending change (overall and by different technologies), cloud adoption/usage trends, as well as an update on the status of COVID-19 driven work from home initiatives and efforts.

ESG’s Master Survey Results provide the complete output of syndicated research surveys in graphical format. In addition to the data, these documents provide background information on the survey, including respondent profiles at an individual and organizational level. It is important to note that these documents do not contain analysis of the data.

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Modern Application Development Security

November 19, 2020

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Enterprise Strategy Group

ESG’s Master Survey Results provide the complete output of syndicated research surveys in graphical format. In addition to the data, these documents provide background information on the survey, including respondent profiles at an individual and organizational level. It is important to note that these documents do not contain analysis of the data.

This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on the purchasing intentions, investment habits, and deployment practices of security solutions with respect to the deployment and management of application security

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Trends in Digital Workspaces, VDI, and DaaS

November 17, 2020

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Mark Bowker

Alternative device choices, employee requirements and preferences (often influenced by technology experiences outside the workplace), and a drive to improve the businesses security posture are all challenging how traditional desktops are delivered to, maintained for, and consumed by end-user employees. Additionally, new features seem to be introduced daily and network access abounds throughout employees’ daily lives, while endpoint device innovation challenges the traditional endpoint experience, IT management and security strategies, and legacy processes.

These factors have converged to create the ideal conditions for alternate endpoint strategies. Specifically, assembling a digital workspace and consuming desktops from a centralized data center or the cloud can create a consistent IT management experience, fortify security, and help to deliver the high-quality “day-one endpoint experience” on an everyday basis. In order to gain insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 354 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) responsible for or involved in the purchase process for productivity applications and endpoint devices, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop-as-a-service solutions (DaaS).

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Keep an Eye on IBM Cloud

November 17, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with the IBM Cloud team on a couple of projects and met with some great professionals with significant expertise in disaster recovery and data protection in general. The IBM Cloud team leverages a number of partners in its ecosystem and IBM services. As the title of this short post indicates, keep an eye on IBM Cloud, as they have built and are working on furthering a great platform for BC/DR.

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IBM Storage Goes Cloud-native: Innovating for the Needs of Containers and Application Modernization

October 28, 2020

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Scott Sinclair

This should be obvious by now, but container-based apps are different from traditional applications. Yet too many IT vendors still treat container-based application environments with the same expectations and the same infrastructure design.

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HYCU Does It Again

October 27, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

I wonder when people sleep at HYCU! I have been tracking the company for 2.5 years, and it’s been innovating and introducing new solutions at a very nice clip, demonstrating focused execution.

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Real-world SLAs and Availability Requirements

October 26, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

Data protection technologies and processes mean nothing unless objectives are not only established and aligned with business and IT objectives, but also measured and improved over time. As organizations increasingly shift to more hybrid and data-intelligent infrastructures, understanding real-world data protection and availability SLAs is becoming more critical for both IT practitioners and the vendors that provide supporting technology.

In order to gain insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 378 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) personally responsible for or involved in data protection technology and process decisions for their organizations, specifically those pertaining to the ability to meet SLAs associated with applications/workloads. This research aimed to understand the current state of end-users’ deployments, identify gaps, and highlight future expectations. Tolerance for downtime, downtime metrics, and real-world SLAs in the context of actual data loss were studied against the backdrop of availability technologies and methods, including hybrid environments.

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VMworld 2020: What’s Next for VMware Heros? (Video)

October 16, 2020

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Mark Bowker

For the last decade, IT pros have mapped their career paths to server virtualization and have truly become heroes inside their organization. Now, they have the opportunity to accelerate their careers with containers as they map closer to modern application development. Tune in as Scott Sinclair and I share our observations on VMworld 2020 and what the future holds for IT professionals.
VMworld 2020 Inspires Trust & Productivity for Remote Work (Video)

October 16, 2020

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Mark Bowker

The acceleration of digital workspaces has been fascinating to observe, as businesses have had to flip the switch to remote work. Businesses have found themselves exposed and underprepared, but platforms like VMware Workspace ONE are helping organizations enable remote work for employees with confidence. How organizations managed & maintained applications and devices was slowly rounding the curve 12+ months ago. Now, organizations are living the benefits real-time with the help of VMware. Please listen in as I share some observations from VMworld 2020 and keep tuned in as Enterprise Strategy Group focuses on user experiences and employee monitoring.
SOAPA Interview with Dr. Anton Chuvakin of Google Chronicle, Part 2 (Video)

October 14, 2020

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Jon Oltsik
Anton Chuvakin knows his stuff, so I was excited to have him participate in Enterprise Strategy Group’s SOAPA video series. In part 2 of our video, Anton and I chat about:
1. Security data. I mention to Anton that many SOC teams are buried in large volumes of security telemetry and then ask if we are trying to collect, process, and analyze more data than we need. Anton responds that we have too much “dirty data” that really isn’t useful. Therefore, the challenge is understanding which telemetry is useful, how it’s useful, and which other data elements we need for data enrichment to improve the efficacy and efficiency of our analytics.
2. Common Chronicle use cases. Speaking of data, Google Chronicle is unique in that customers can keep security data on-line for long periods of time (without a hefty price tag). What do customers do with this data? Anton mentions the most common Chronicle use cases are incident response and threat detection. He also says that Chronicle is the first security platform to include threat hunting as a core function. No, these use cases aren’t unique, but Chronicle’s approach is.
3. The tradeoff between security efficacy and complexity. This will always be a balancing act because security analytics and operations are difficult by default. Anton doesn’t believe there will ever be a magic single solution. Rather, best-of-breed tools interoperability will improve through API integration. Kind of sounds like SOAPA.
4. SOC modernization. A nebulous term from the start, so I ask Anton for his definition. Anton describes SOC modernization across people, process, and technology, highlighting things like distributed/integrated tools, changing skill sets and specializations, and broader processes beyond alert triage – like threat hunting and data exploration.
5. The future of SOAPA. I always ask my guests to predict the future of the SOC and SOAPA, so it was somewhat surprising that Anton chose to focus on the human element. Despite technologies like machine learning and process automation, Anton insists that we will still need highly motivated and skilled SOC analysts who understand the threat landscape and use their experience and intuition to make sense of the data. I couldn’t agree more.
Many thanks to Anton and the Google Chronicle team for participating in the SOAPA video series. Look for more SOAPA videos soon.
Happy Birthday Metallic!

October 14, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand
It’s hard to believe that almost exactly a year ago, on October 14, 2019, Commvault launched Metallic, which is now an award-winning solution. As a product guy, I know from experience how difficult but rewarding it is to get an award at VMworld for your solution. A one-year old solution with a best in show is very impressive. Well done Metallic team! More importantly: well executed!

The stakes are high in this vendor space with intense competition (including in the SaaS backup/DR segment) as end-users accelerate their digital transformation and rely on data even more than before. Not to mention the ransomware attacks intensification. The present and future of BC/DR are “cloudy” and, based on our research, we expect to see organizations continuing to adopt data protection as a service moving forward, and an evolution toward intelligent data management and data reuse. These are very favorable trends.

Let’s look at the execution side of the equation: the addition of Manoj Nair a few months ago as GM built on the original momentum culminating in the recent partnership announcement with Azure, based on a long-standing relationship between Commvault and Microsoft. This is where strategy meets execution, with a meaningful partnership based on years of “dancing” together. It’s something that I firmly believe will in time differentiate this offering from others where everyone dances with everyone.

Let me summarize some highlights of one quick year. Metallic launched October 14^th 2019. Since then:
- Strategic MSFT Partnership announced.
- Azure Marketplace launch (Office 365).
- Feature expansion: Hyper V Support.
- Manoj Nair becomes GM.
- Metallic offers free endpoint offer to help with the shift to a remote workforce.
- CAD Expansion.
- Metallic partners with Zones (Office 365 Backup and Recovery).
- Feature expansion: Azure Blob & File Support.
- Azure Marketplace Launch (Endpoint).
- New eDiscovery and GDPR compliance features + support for more Microsoft workloads.
- Awards: SaaS Awards finalist; IT World Awards Winner.
- ANZ Expansion.
- Feature expansion: Commvault Command Center Integration.
- Awards: Gold Stevies Winner.
I may have missed some milestones, but you get the idea.

I wrote in other blogs how Commvault has been transforming at a rapid pace, with the acquisition of Hedvig being a move that positioned Commvault ahead of the race in the containers space, many features additions, and of course Metallic, which was designed to be a cloud solution from inception. Both the Hedvig and Metallic moves were what I call “pragmatically visionary.” They were big strategic and market differentiating decisions focused on an informed belief of future market directions (containers, SaaS), and (of course!) they could also be monetized reasonably quickly with the right level of execution and investment. Which takes us to today.

The Metallic offering is now at what seems like a very desirable inflection point and prime for accelerated growth. It’s making Commvault as a whole more competitive and will clearly get in the way of newer SaaS-focused vendors. One year is a long time in the SaaS space. Let’s take a look at where Metallic is one year from now. In the meantime: Happy Birthday!
The Big Memory Movement – Conversation with Charles Fan of MemVerge (Video)

October 12, 2020

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Scott Sinclair

Application modernization efforts are pushing traditional infrastructure to its limits in an era where businesses across nearly every industry depend upon data and applications to not only continue operations, but to also create new opportunities. High performance improves customer experience, accelerates business operations, and can deliver superior business results. Technology is no longer simply a passenger for business operations, it is the now the engine and often the driver as well.

To support this new role, architectures must evolve. The traditional process of moving data to and from the processor has stayed relatively consistent for a while now. Data is moved from a relatively slow but persistent tier of storage into a much faster, non-persistent tier of memory, the processor goes to work on the data, and then the output is put back into the memory, and then moved back to the slow, persistent storage tier. For years, we as an industry have looked at that sequence and said “Why can’t we just keep data in the fast tier? Why move it at all?” Realities of cost constraints, and application limitations, and that lack of persistence have held us back. Now the rise of persistent memory solutions and the Big Memory movement is poised to change all that.

In my interview with Charles Fan, CEO of MemVerge, we discuss Big Memory, MemVerge’s vision to make persistent memory accessible, and discuss what the future of IT might look like in a world where persistent memory is widely available. I hope you enjoy our conversation.