With an eye on what’s expected in 2012, let’s look at the significant trends through the past year. Cloud and virtualization dominated conversations in 2011, and we definitely saw an increase in the adoption of virtualization. Concerns over information security continued to influence the IT landscape. Information emerged as the focus area as enterprises tried to secure and manage the same. Planning towards DR efforts and information retention policies were also major highlights of the year 2011.

Here are the five major trends that are set to influence the storage and backup areas within the enterprise IT in 2012:

Information governance will become a positive buzzword

Information is the great enabler, and the great disabler depending on how it is managed. Companies that will gain control over the risks and costs by protecting their information will enable the adoption of new mobile, social media and cloud technologies. These organizations will leverage their information assets as competitive advantages and attract the best employees.

On the other hand, companies that fail to control and protect their data will fall victim to it. Their lack of information governance will prevent the adoption of new technologies, and they will spend more on compliance and eDiscovery.

In 2012, vendors will bring together archiving, eDiscovery, encryption, backup, data loss prevention and other security technologies to give organizations better control over their information assets.

Private cloud will not become a cloud in a box

Clouds do not come in a box. You can’t purchase hardware and expect it to suddenly have a cloud computing environment. Data center managers who have implemented cloud technologies and virtualization did so to simplify. Yet, at the core of this huge transition to the cloud – both public and private – are business advantages including scalability, agility, control and measurability.

Running your data center more like a cloud vendor is about central management and visibility, automation, standardization of operations and building service level focused offerings. It’s about getting the best use of your resources through pooling, multi-tenancy, and accountability through chargebacks. Buying new hardware does not achieve that. Changing the way you manage your data center achieves that. And, one might argue that buying a cloud in a box from a premium vendor goes against the way the leading providers manage their cloud.

Large cloud providers like Google and Amazon don’t buy super-expensive hardware. The model doesn’t scale. They use commodity hardware. And it’s proprietary, so it’s hard to develop and innovate beyond it as opposed to open systems and open source solutions, and even harder to migrate off of – so you can easily get locked in. It’s often siloed, so you can’t pool resources as easily. Overall, it goes against the IT trends of commoditization, openness and resource pooling that have driven the IT industry over the last decade.

Cloud computing is increasingly more about the people and processes – a culture shift about how companies use IT and existing resources – servers, storage and people. Organizations must change how they purchase IT, how they consume IT, and how they organize IT to provide cloud services.

Increased interdependence of physical and virtual technologies

Virtualization projects often start as a small project and eventually grow into large portions of the IT environment. In 2012, many companies will combine the VM project teams and infrastructure with corporate IT. This will highlight the need for physical and virtual assets to work together as a platform.

Often IT professionals get so consumed with the buzz surrounding virtualization that they forget that virtualization still runs on physical hardware. And, all the new hardware that is needed for those new projects, meaning more capital costs up front, but more painfully, less utilization due to more server/storage islands. Companies that adopt a silo approach will be laggards in the VM adoption race. Their ROI for virtualization will continue to decrease as operational costs of running separate environments slow the ability of organizations to convert from physical to virtual. The days that companies could afford separate storage management and backup software for virtual and physical servers are numbered. The answer to managing this complexity is standardizing across their various platforms with tools that work across the various physical and virtual platforms for systems management, availability, back-up, storage management, security, etc.

As a result the security, storage management and backup of both physical and virtual assets together will become the standard.

Backup fights back in 2012

You can’t call backup a boring market anymore. The backup market is growing fast. What used to be considered a mature and slow growth market is putting up some impressive numbers. Backup integrated VM protection, deduplication, snapshot management, appliances and some key changes to the operating model are driving the change.

Organizations that rely on snapshots rather than backup and don’t implement deduplication or granular recovery technology for virtual environments will see backup and recovery windows increase. However, new technologies introduced by vendors will change the way data protection is done, saving organizations millions of dollars each year.

Additionally, organizations relying on a different backup tool for every platform have created an unsustainable level of complexity within their environment. There needs to be a higher level of centralization, especially if companies expect to move to the cloud and continue to virtualize their infrastructure.

Data center managers who have deployed separate dedupe, snapshot management, tape or disk backup, VMware and Hyper-V backup strategies will move to simplify the backup process. The idea of an uber-recovery platform will emerge because recovery from a “Balkanized” backup environment is very complex. Vendors will need to recentralize technologies to reduce complexity.

Organizations will need to implement their DR plans

In 2011, there were significantly more natural disasters than previous years. We expect in 2012, we will continue to see Mother Nature test organizations’ disaster recovery plans. We’re living in a 24x7 world, so for businesses to keep running, IT needs to keep running. There are so many new risks that just having plans is not good enough. Virtualization and cloud have put even more pressure for IT organizations to re-think their strategies.

Organizations need to start looking at business services more holistically. They need to automate recovery to recover faster and reduce their reliance on personnel. Also, the organizations need to become disaster proof.