10 Predictions for Data Protection for 2015

1. Tape backup will be relegated to either offsite disaster recovery or for long-term version history. Backing up to tape at the primary site will virtually disappear in 2015 and will be replaced with disk-based backup with data deduplication.

2. 50% of all offsite disaster recovery will be tape and 50% will be disk.

3. The SMB, organisations with a few terabytes or less, will continue to move towards cloud backup solutions either to vendors with their own cloud or to public cloud providers.

4. The mid-market to enterprise (organisations with 5TB of data to petabytes of data), will continue to do their own backup and disaster recovery solutions as a private cloud.

5. The market share of traditional backup applications will barely shift except for Veeam for virtualised backup as Veeam will continue to take market share.

6. Software deduplication will stall as customers realise its limitations.

7. Organisations will begin to investigate and trial test DR as a service (DRAAS).

8. The “copy data” approach to backup will be relegated to large enterprise due to the high cost.

9. Primary storage snapshots will continue to be integrated with traditional backup applications as an additional source of collecting data for backups. This will begin the long-road merging of primary storage snapshots with traditional backup applications.

10. Backup across the board won’t look that much different at the end of 2015 as it did at the beginning of 2015 as changes in data backup traditionally move at glacier speed.