ESG Blogs

When I started ESG in 1999, the IT industry was organized essentially as follows:

• There were a handful of giant players who controlled 90% of the market. You picked your OPERATING environment first, and then you bought their kit, and whatever applications they had, and you CHANGED your company to implement their solutions. If you picked Digital Equipment and you wanted to customize your Ask MANMAN ERP system, you paid out the nose and spent years to get it into production. Same for HP or IBM. You ran their apps the way they told you to. The cost of switching out was insane.
• There were massive capital costs combined with limited skilled knowledge workers. Which translated into “if it ain’t broken, don’t touch it!”
• There were generalists, not specialists. Your IT department consisted of “system” admins – people responsible for making the whole thing run “good enough.” When things broke, they chased down the problems, largely starting blind.

2019 was a year of contrasts for backup and recovery but also confirmed the great health and growth potential in this market. It is, however, at the cusp of a critical change, one that will see vendors pivot to expanded capabilities and new use cases. Those who don’t invest in these new capabilities (organically or through acquisitions) will enter a phase of slow decline, which may not be immediately evident but that will be hard to reverse. More on this in the predictions section.

After the recent Dell Technologies Summit, I posted a video with my summary thoughts on the event, its tone, and its key announcements. (Watch it here.)

But, as mentioned in my blog at the time, I also wanted to drill down a bit more into some of the specific technology areas, as well as get the commentary of some smart people that I am lucky enough to have as colleagues here at ESG. In this companion video, you will hear from Bob Laliberte, Christophe Bertrand, and Scott Sinclair. Six minutes, four brains, multiple insights...

Getting Email Security Right Is More Important than Ever Before

With business email compromise racking up some of the largest financial theft associated with cyber-crime, and the relentless use of phishing as a means to trick users into handing over user credentials and other personal and sensitive data to bad actors, security organizations need to take a hard look at how their email security solutions are protecting against these issues.

Even if Dell is not quite at its own intended summit yet, it certainly showed a route map, milestones, tools, and (mixing metaphors wildly!) drew a notable line in the sand at its recent event in Austin.

The video here captures my high level (ha - back to the summit metaphor!?) takeaways from the event. I won’t spoil your viewing pleasure by repeating things here....suffice to say that I saw a massive company fully aware of its opportunities, obstacles, and even obligations.

In a previous blog, I discussed the multi-channel coverage of the elastic cloud gateway (ECG) architecture. In short, ECGs consolidate the functionality of multiple point products to improve centralized visibility and control over an organization’s traffic – be it network, web, or cloud application-based. A key enabler of this consolidation is the microservices architecture of ECGs and the inherent scalability that comes from a cloud-native approach.

Dreamforce 2019 just kicked off in San Francisco. What an event and a great boost to the local economy: lots of people, celebrity speakers, lots of vendors, and many locations around the Moscone Center to accommodate the many sessions and events. A forest theme was selected this year - a forest in the middle of the urban forest - with cute characters including a bear...the same bear I am going to poke in this blog entry.

Salesforce is a formidable player, a trailblazer (check the little guy's shirt!) that made SaaS what it is today. It's a great success by any stretch of the imagination.

SaaS is an interesting space that we study closely here at ESG, and we see a big disconnect when it comes to backup and recovery, and many challenges with Salesforce specifically. 33% of respondents to our cloud data strategies survey believe that SaaS-based applications don't need to be backed up, and 37% solely rely on the SaaS vendor because they are responsible for protecting the organization's SaaS-resident application data. 

At this year’s Dell Tech Summit, there were several high-impact announcements, each one important and each one valuable. But, with each, the real story will be whether these are just single isolated announcements or whether each one can become a first step in a larger journey that helps define Dell and its offerings moving forward.

When ESG began discussing the elastic cloud gateway (ECG) architecture in July, one of the key questions we were asked centered on SD-WAN and the importance of the convergence of networking and security. The short answer is that while strong integrations between networking and SD-WAN functionality and security capabilities are clearly necessary, partnerships will be the predominant route for the next few years. Sure, there are vendors that will provide both, be they someone like Cisco that has both networking and security capabilities, or smaller upstarts like Cato Networks. But our feeling was that those would be the exceptions, not the rule.