HPE’s July 1, 2021 announcement of its intent to acquire Zerto reflects a market shift away from siloed data protection solutions, into more comprehensive data management offerings that span multi-cloud, and containerized and virtualized resources, and that are delivered as-a-service.
Today’s production IT environments incorporate hybrid and multi-cloud resources, a growing number of edge sites and remote devices, and increasingly containerized alongside virtualized infrastructure. This is a complex environment to be protected, necessitating a data protection solution that is comprehensive in its coverage and that also is as automated and easy-to-use as possible.
Also along the vein of simplicity, Evaluator Group has fielded a growing number of customer inquiries about backup-as-a-service (BUaaS) and disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) over the past 12 to 18 months – in large part to mitigate the amount of backup and data protection-specific expertise required by IT staff. Additionally, “data protection-as-a-service” can increase the scalability of the protection environment and eliminate the need for a secondary data center that needs to be purchased and maintained. Another important value-add especially during the pandemic is the level of remote access that an “as-a-service” model can provide.
Also from the standpoint of comprehensiveness, Evaluator Group sees data protection offerings being expanded to cover the range of backup and data protection use cases, from operational recoveries that can tolerate some downtime and data loss to true disaster recovery (DR) situations that require immediate failover and extremely minimal data loss.
Data protection software is also being evolved to serve as the foundation of “data management” capabilities that extend beyond backup and DR into areas such as copy data management (CDM), data governance and compliance oversight to address regulatory requirements, and data migration to allow data to be able to be portable across various environments.
Download now to read the full free Industry Snapshot report!
