Meeting the Intelligent Data Management needs of 2019

India is at the cusp of digital transformation, witnessing an unprecedented growth in the volume of data generated. Human and machine generated data is growing ten times faster than traditional business data, and machine data is growing at 50 times that of traditional business data. With the way we consume and interact with data changing daily, and the number of innovations to enhance business agility and operational efficiency are plentiful. In this environment, the demand for Intelligent Data Management is increasing as businesses seek to stay one step ahead and deliver enhanced services to their customers.

So, what are the hot trends for 2019? According to Dave Russell, Vice President for Product Strategy and  Sandeep Bhambure, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Veeam Software, there are four in particular:

1. Multi-Cloud usage and exploitation will rise.

In 2019, CIOs and IT leaders are expected to take the leap in adopting multi-cloud infrastructure and move the mission-critical workloads on the cloud. This is not to say that on-premises data and applications will go away, but that the deployment models for your data will expand with an increasing mix of on-prem, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds. Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today.

Sandeep Bhambure, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Veeam Software

2. Modernizing the Data protection environment:

Modernizing data protection solutions should be the key priority for CIOs as just modernizing the IT production environment may not help CIOs in accelerating their digital transformation journey. Additionally, the cloud should be targeted as a long-term archival or data protection platform as it offers the flexibility and scale along with the cost economies.

3. Flash memory supply shortages, and prices, will improve in 2019.

Greater supply and improved pricing will result in greater use of flash deployment in the operational recovery tier, which typically hosts the most recent 14 days of backup and replica data. We see this greater flash capacity leading to broader usage of instant mounting of backed up machine images (or Copy Data Management).

We include this Copy Data Management capability in our platform under the name Veeam DataLabs, and it helps to deliver value beyond availability, along with better business outcomes. Example use cases for leveraging backup and replica data include DevOps, DevSecOps and DevTest, Patch Testing, Analytics and Reporting.

4. Partner community gearing up for the cloud

As more workloads continue to move to the cloud, we expect the partner ecosystem to play a critical role in transforming customers cloud footprint. Channel partners can support digitization of IT services and add value to making businesses prepare for challenges and opportunities in the digital era.

5. Predictive Analytics will become mainstream and ubiquitous.

Specifically, here we mean Predictive Analytics based on telemetry data, which is essentially Machine Learning (ML) driven guidance and recommendations. Machine Learning predictions are not new, but we will begin to see them utilizing signatures and fingerprints, containing best practice configurations and policies, to allow the business to get more value out of the infrastructure that you have deployed and are responsible for.

Predictive Analytics, or Diagnostics, will assist us in ensuring continuous operations, while reducing the administrative burden of keeping systems optimized. This capability becomes vitally important as IT organizations are required to manage an increasingly diverse environment, with more data, and with more stringent service level objectives.

As Predictive Analytics become more mainstream, SLAs and SLOs are rising and businesses’ SLEs, Service Level Expectations, are even higher. This means that we need more assistance, more intelligence in order to deliver on what the business expects from us.

Yet, while we see these trends challenging the status quo next year, some things will not change. There are always constants in the world, and we see two major factors that will remain top-of-mind for companies everywhere….

1. Frustration with legacy backup approaches & solutions.

The top 3 vendors in the market continue to lose market share in 2019. In fact, the largest provider in the market has been losing share for 10 years. Companies are moving away from legacy providers and embracing more agile, dynamic, disruptive vendors, such as Veeam, to offer the capabilities that are needed to thrive in the data-driven age.

2. The pain points of the 3 C’s: Cost, Complexity and Capability

These 3 C’s continue to be why people in data centers are unhappy with solutions from other vendors. Broadly speaking, these are excessive costs, unnecessary complexity and a lack of capability, which manifests as speed of backup, speed of restoration or instant mounting to a virtual machine image. These three major criteria will continue to dominate the reasons why organisations augment or fully replace their backup solution.

In 2019, enterprises across industries should focus on Intelligent Data Management to analyze and glean insights from data around us, while ensuring moving away from legacy systems to best meet the needs of tomorrow.