Data Protection as a Service

Over the last few years, there has been a huge evolution of IT services becoming more and more efficient with things like internal cloud, and deep virtualization of compute, network, and storage.  That will continue, but what people haven’t yet focused on is providing backup and archive as one of those hybrid internally provided, and potentially externally provided, services that can be exposed through the service catalog.  This area of IT is ripe for abstraction and cost savings due to its un-evolved state of silo’d implementations within the corporate environment.

What to expect

As I mentioned, IT has evolved in many other areas, and what we are going to see in the backup and archive area is a similar evolution.  Backup and archive target hardware will be exposed via APIs.  The API abstracted targets will have characteristics like:  latency, IOPs, SLAs, and cost associated with them – they will essentially be granular API-based services that can be programmatically consumed. By abstracting the hardware we can pool and provision without disruption to the end application, optimizing target backup utilization and cost.

We will further virtualize backup and archive functions like de-duplication and encryption to enrich our ability to access those functions via APIs.  We will automate all provisioning via consistent abstraction technology enabling a backup and recovery fabric.

In the same way compute has become a mature external service provider offering, backup and archive will evolve similarly

How can you take advantage

In the same way compute has become a mature external service provider offering, backup and archive will evolve similarly.  Currently offers for external pay as you go desktop, file, and object backup are nearing market maturity.

There are three barriers that EMC is helping our customers overcome to prepare them to take advantage of this new “as a Service” opportunity:

1. A financial model that represents the specific costs and return on investment to evolve to the future state environment.
2. A view of backup workloads that meet discrete industry compliance needs as well as individual customer risk profiles as it relates to internal v.s. external backup models.
3. A cohesive and comprehensive roadmap of people, process, and tools to take advantage of the enabling data protection fabric.

As with any significant change in IT operating models and subsequent technology, this is not an overnight process, and it is one of many directly related shifts occurring across corporate IT.  When it comes to market-setting directions in the area of Cloud, Trust, and Big Data, EMC is at the forefront of the industry and as such we are positioned to truly change the not-so-pretty legacy that was IT.  What better place to start than backup and recovery?