One of the reasons that I have stayed in the Data Protection area within IT is that it never seems to be solved. Not that the technologies don’t keep getting better, but the workloads to be protected keep evolving and IT users’ requirements for faster and more agile recoveries continues to evolve. Even today, Data Protection seems to be top of mind for many CIOs and IT decision makers. In fact, in ESG’s annual IT Spending Intentions report for 2013, Improving Data Backup & Recovery was the #2 planned IT spend (it was tied for #1 in 2012’s report).
Said another way, IT is all about your data – so how are you protecting it? Relentless data growth, virtualization deployments, cloud strategies, consolidation initiatives, and more aggressive service level agreements are just a few of the major trends affecting data protection environments. Data protection is likely to se increased spending in 2013 in the areas of new tools and technologies, particularly those focused on data backup and recovery, BC/DR and regulatory compliance.