What does the data protection industry have in store for 2016?  Asigra’s perspective over the next 12 months sees organizations seeking to simplify data protection management and control expenses related to expected increases in the volume of data under management. For IT that means that there will be a rise in demand for highly scalable, centralized solutions with innovations that reduce capital and operational costs.

Data Volumes Maintain Upward Trajectory

According to MarketsandMarkets the global Storage Software Market is forecast to grow from $15.11 billion in 2014 to $23.33 billion by 2019, at a CAGR of 9.1% during the forecast period. The major driver for the increase in demand of storage solutions is primarily a result of fast growing data storage volumes and in particular from unstructured data. Further driving adoption is the significant and growing demand for storage virtualization.  With the influx of data in mind, Asigra has identified the drivers it expects will be impacted by data growth in 2016:

1. Diversification of data creation and storage across computing platforms: Organizations today are continuing their expansion into cloud-based systems, mobile computing platform that include tablets and smartphones, virtualized infrastructure and the increasing use of SaaS-based applications as well as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Data being generated and stored in these Applications and on these platforms is more commonly considered valuable to the organization and must be protected. The diversity of these platforms calls for data recovery solutions capable of centralizing the backup and recovery of data regardless of where it resides.
2. Increasing need to strengthen disaster recovery capabilities: As environmental and political circumstances change, the risk of data loss becomes a legitimate concern. Regulations calling for greater redundancies in the protection of data now require many regions to store duplicate copies of data offsite to ensure recovery in the event of a site failure. Furthermore, the threat of floods, fire, major storms and other external forces cast a shadow over IT resiliency that can only be safeguarded by implementing a proper DR strategy that maintains central oversight.
3. Inclusion of emerging IT platforms such as Docker Containers into existing data recovery infrastructure: While server virtualization has seen enormous uptake over the years, new IT platforms such as Docker Containers are creating new possibilities and new repositories of data that must be accounted for in the organizational data recovery plan. The right converged data protection platform will be future proof in that it will provide avenues for protecting hybrid IT environments that utilize cloud infrastructure from Amazon and others.
4. Shorter recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for mission critical environments: IT professionals under pressure to maintain business continuity are increasingly working to meet more stringent RTOs and RPOs for mission critical systems such as databases, email, and business-specific data. Converged data protection solutions allow for the incorporation of higher performance recovery within existing data recovery infrastructure to centralize and reduce management complexity.
5. Performance-oriented pricing: As data volumes grow exponentially, backup and recovery becomes increasingly expensive. The problem is that organizations typically pay based on how much data is backed up so as volumes grow, so does the price. 2016 will see increasing adoption of alternative pricing models such as recovery performance-based pricing where there is greater control over costs even as data volumes rise.

The growing landscape in IT is pushing data volumes to new heights according to Asigra’s Eran Farajun and as a result, 2016 will be an exciting year for those vendors that understand the challenges that data growth and diversity present. You can learn more about Asigra’s latest data backup predictions by reading our recent press release http://www.asigra.com/about-asigra/press-releases/asigra-forecasts-data-protection-convergence-2016

To learn more about Asigra, visit: www.asigra.com