Symantecs Storage Trends for 2011: Virtualization Remains King

Edited by Chris Preimesberger

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.??í??íA recent survey??ífound little more than half of the data within virtual systems is regularly backed up, leaving plenty of room for improvement.

In the event of a disaster, 60 percent of an organization’s data that is stored in virtual environments may not be recoverable because enterprises have failed to implement data protection technologies. Remembering that virtual machine protection carries with it the same expectation that customers have of physical environments, enterprises should implement disaster recovery technologies to ensure their mission-critical data in virtual environments is protected from a range of dangers from everyday business risks to all-out disasters.??í

Storage administrators must lose their “pack rat” mentality and categorize what information is most important in 2011.??íThe near-infinite level of data retention is causing storage costs to skyrocket. This factor vastly increases data recovery times and causes e-discovery nightmares across enterprises of all sizes. In 2011 enterprises will re-evaluate their retention needs and automate their information management strategy to keep backups for 30??íto 60 days, archive for long-term storage and delete everything else.

The cloud will greatly change the way services are delivered in 2011.??íMore enterprises will leverage public and private clouds as they become highly available.??íAs 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.

The hybrid cloud archiving model will also be adopted to allow enterprises to use hosted messaging services while keeping their archives on-premises 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.??í

While software continues to drive innovation, 2011 will bring new delivery models in response to the customer need to streamline IT operations.??íCloud computing, hosted services and appliances are examples of increasingly attractive delivery models that provide enterprises with flexibility and ease of deployment.??íIn 2011, enterprises can expect to tackle agility, technology and storage optimization through unified storage devices with security and backup cloud access.

Consolidation is top of mind for the IT industry, and enterprises will redefine what their data centers look like in 2011 to reduce costs while protecting data. Whether the consolidation involves a physical move, virtualization, decommissioning or any combination these options, enterprises need to manage the risks and complexity of data center consolidation. In addition, enterprises must ensure information and applications are protected and available during consolidation to avoid unplanned downtime and data loss.??íIt’s no secret that as we head into 2011, consolidation will be a top theme.

The way we collaborate in the enterprise will change in 2011 with the move to leverage more social media to improve communication and productivity throughout the enterprise. However, IT departments will also need to understand how to protect and manage these nonstandard applications for recovery and discovery of business information that is communicated in these outlets.??íSocial media archiving will grow in importance as companies unleash the power of social business, but maintain archiving as a form of control to reduce data loss risks.