The last mile of virtualization
Virtualization has been one of the biggest shifts over the
last year and will continue to influence IT in 2011.
Companies everywhere are achieving the benefits of
virtualization by reducing the number of servers in their
environments. In addition, the ability to backup and recover
applications and data from both physical and virtual environments
with a single solution will help organizations reduce overall costs
and IT complexity. However, it does lead to an increase in
management costs, and without a plan to protect these environments;
companies may not realize the full ROI.
The rapid adoption, yet fragmented implementation and lack of
standardization when it comes to virtual infrastructure will expose
gaps in the security and backup of virtual environments over the
next year.
Gap in disaster recovery for virtual
environments
The number of applications and amount of data in virtual
environments will grow significantly in 2011, increasing the need
for disaster recovery solutions that protect these applications.
The 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery Survey found that while a
little more than half of data within virtual systems is regularly
backed up, there is significant room for improvement.
Remembering that virtual machine protection carries with it
the same expectation that customers have of physical environments,
organizations should implement disaster recovery technologies to
ensure their mission-critical data in virtual environments is
protected from everyday business risks to devastating disasters.
Regain control of information
retention
The near infinite level of data retention is causing storage
costs to skyrocket, extensive recovery times and e-Discovery
nightmares across organizations of all sizes.
In 2011, organizations will re-evaluate their retention needs
and automate their information management strategy to keep backups
for 30 - 60 days, archive for long term storage and delete
everything else.
Cloud storage grows up
More organizations will leverage public and private clouds as
they become highly available.
As we head into 2011, enterprises will require the ability to
manage storage resources whether they're local, campus wide,
multi-campus, global or in the cloud. Tools will emerge to
manage this new complex storage environment and help IT
administrators better understand and capture information about
unstructured data that resides within it.
The hybrid cloud archiving model will also be adopted to allow
organizations to use hosted messaging services while keeping their
archives on-premise to drive cost out of the discovery process,
maintain strict access to data, and define who is searching it and
where they are sending requests.
The right to choose: appliances, software
and cloud
2011 will bring new delivery models in response to customer
needs to ease IT operations. Organizations can expect to
tackle agility, technology and storage optimization through unified
storage devices with security and backup cloud access.
Cloud computing, hosted services and appliances are examples
of increasingly attractive delivery models that provide
organizations with flexibility and ease of deployment.
Consolidation and the next generation data
center
In 2011, consolidation is top of mind for the IT industry and
organizations will redefine what their data centers look like under
the pressures to reduce costs while protecting data.
Organizations need to manage the risks and complexity of data
center consolidation. In addition.
Organizations must ensure information and applications are
protected and available during consolidation to avoid unplanned
downtime and data loss.
Social media
The way we collaborate in the enterprise will change in 2011
as organizations have started to leverage more social media to
improve communication and productivity.
However, IT organizations will also need to understand how to
protect and manage these non-standard applications for recovery and
discovery of business information that is communicated in these
outlets.
Social media archiving will grow in importance as companies
unleash the power of social business but maintain archiving as a
form of control to reduce information risk.
Anand Naik is Director, System Engineering,
Symantec