As organizations look for better ways to integrate, analyze, visualize, and leverage insights from constantly growing data sets, the rise of the cloud has garnered significant interest and traction in the analytics space. The cloud offers numerous enterprise-class attributes that make it more appealing than on-premises environments for organizations, whether they are looking to embrace a data-driven culture or align specific technology to a single line of business.
Data Management & Analytics
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Informatica, a leader in enterprise cloud data management, recently announced several enterprise data management enhancements across its unified, AI-powered Intelligent Data Platform to promote agility, efficiency, and productivity. Updates include next-generation analytics, an AI-powered data catalog, cloud and hybrid updates for AWS and MS Azure provisioning and autoscaling, data governance, privacy, 360 engagement, and a customer success portal.
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Most enterprises have many decentralized locations and sometimes operate a model where there is no real “central” data center. Our research shows that these ROBO topologies are particularly sensitive to data protection challenges—for example, at organizations with many branches (retail, food chains, gas stations, etc.). -
Organizations are turning to AI technologies to enhance their data analytics capabilities and address the real-time needs of the business through faster, more accurate predictive insights. But between skills gaps, limited collaboration, and ineffective or minimally available tooling, organizations are looking for help. Cloudera has introduced Cloudera Machine Learning as the next evolution of their proven Cloudera Data Science Workbench to provide organizations with the help they need to achieve success in leapfrogging the competition using AI.
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In order to assess technology spending priorities over the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 658 IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations in North America and Western Europe. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2019 IT spending as well as their 2020 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or at a business unit/division/branch level.
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications and media, retail, government, and business services.
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Version 10 is going GA with the usual fanfare that great marketing companies such as Veeam know how to orchestrate, but it’s different this time. Something is changing.In the past, and despite our most respectful recriminations, Veeam would pre-announce new versions and sometimes over-hype their capabilities. Hard to stop the Veeam marketing machine when it’s in launch mode!! I have seen it both on the vendor side as a competitor (with secret admiration) and on the analyst side at ESG.
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A chasm exists between traditional “dumb” data backup, in which data is only moved around but not leveraged to drive or support business outcomes, and data management, in which data is better understood and reused for other technical or business purposes. The data protection space is undergoing a fundamental shift from traditional backup and recovery with the emergence of more autonomous AI-based solutions.
In order to understand how this confluence of changes is creating a dichotomy between currently available solutions and end-users’ desired data protection state in the next few years, ESG surveyed 359 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) responsible for data protection technology decisions for their organization.
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In my predictions for 2020, I highlighted that tape is not going away any time soon. It’s actually experiencing a renewal as it has become quite obvious to a whole new generation of IT professionals that it is a great medium for high-capacity and low-cost storage. While the traditional use case of backup and recovery suffered in the past from recovery performance limitations compared to disk, other use cases have recently emerged. Large-scale archiving of course but also cold cloud storage, which is really large-scale archiving behind a cloud service interface and consumption model. Yes…tape actually powers a whole bunch of storage cloud services! Capacity, automation, and low cost make it possible.
Modern devices that integrate fast “cache” layers and the ability to leverage easy and friendly user and file system interfaces now make it a lot easier to “plug” tape into an environment without having to hire a PhD in “tapeology.” In combination with specialized high performance devices, mass producers of data can leverage high-performance (memory and disk-based) devices for production, and high-performance/large-capacity tape devices for storage. The media space is a good example.
A couple of tape vendors have recently announced initiatives and/or new products that help address parts of the gigantic ransomware issue. It should come as no surprise: Tape can easily be put off-line, air-gapping the data from the main network and the outside world—and by that I mean the nefarious actors that might corrupt the data to extort a ransom. It’s a great solution that can help improve compliance levels, and provide a “gold” copy type and isolated recovery capability. Some ransomware attacks can corrupt backups—sometimes specifically targeting the backup systems—so everyone should have an air-gapped gold copy mechanism in place. With modern devices and many integrations into the ecosystem, recovery can be accelerated (compared to the good old days) should it be necessary. I recently wrote a paper on the topic for HPE.
As I said, tape is not going away any time soon… 🙂
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2020 started with a bang in the data protection space with the announcement of the acquisition of Veeam by Private Equity firm Insight Partners. Insight Partners is no stranger to the space, having invested in Acronis, as well. In this short blog, I am going to net out my views on this acquisition. It’s great news for the market! Let’s be clear, the backup and recovery space is hot and growing, but it is yesterday’s market. It is evolving into something else, which I have coined the data intelligence market, an evolution of backup and recovery that places data and data reuse at the heart of the enterprise. Whether enabling digital transformation or leveraging “dark” or dormant data, the idea is to leverage data assets. This acquisition is about the next stage of the market.
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ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT and data protection professionals at private- and public-sector organizations in North America (US and Canada) between June 28, 2019 and July 21, 2019. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be IT decision makers currently responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ production storage and data protection mechanisms, as well as their organization’s approaches to facilitating data usage by primary and secondary beneficiaries.
This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on the transition from traditional data backup processes to data management strategies in which data is better understood and reused for other technical or business purposes.
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ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT professionals from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada) and Western Europe (UK, France, and Germany) between October 31, 2019 and November 26, 2019. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be senior IT professionals familiar and involved with their organization’s overall 2020 IT budget and spending plans. All respondents were provided an incentive to complete the survey in the form of cash awards and/or cash equivalents.
This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on 2020 IT budget expectations, technology initiatives and priorities, year-over-year spending change (overall and by different technologies), hiring/staffing challenges, and cloud adoption/usage trends.
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As of January 1st, the California Consumer Privacy Act is now in effect. The CCPA lets anyone in California request all the information a company has on them as a consumer, including what data has been sold to /accessed by other companies. And when it comes to penalties, if a company is notified of being out of compliance (i.e., unable to provide all the data of their consumers), they have 30 days to comply or they will get fined per record. And that “per record” component is important because it highlights how quickly a fine could balloon into billions of dollars in fines. The interesting component of this is that if a company doesn’t comply, it opens companies to face class action lawsuits from consumers.
Most enterprises have many decentralized locations and sometimes operate a model where there is no real “central” data center. Our research shows that these ROBO topologies are particularly sensitive to data protection challenges
Version 10 is going GA with the usual fanfare that great marketing companies such as Veeam know how to orchestrate, but it’s different this time. Something is changing.
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2020 started with a bang in the data protection space with the announcement of the acquisition of Veeam by Private Equity firm Insight Partners. Insight Partners is no stranger to the space, having invested in Acronis, as well. In this short blog, I am going to net out my views on this acquisition. 
As of January 1st, the California Consumer Privacy Act is now in effect. The CCPA lets anyone in California request all the information a company has on them as a consumer, including what data has been sold to /accessed by other companies. And when it comes to penalties, if a company is notified of being out of compliance (i.e., unable to provide all the data of their consumers), they have 30 days to comply or they will get fined per record. And that “per record” component is important because it highlights how quickly a fine could balloon into billions of dollars in fines. The interesting component of this is that if a company doesn’t comply, it opens companies to face class action lawsuits from consumers.