What's next for enterprise backup and recovery technologies?

Backup had to evolve to adapt to the changing digital environment since the dawn of information technologies. Today, backups are at the heart of ransomware recovery strategies, serving as a source of data that can be analyzed or containing datasets that require rapid recoveries. Containers and microservices, as well as multi and hybrid cloud operations, are all widespread today, and backup and recovery technologies must evolve to secure the data created and stored in complex digital operations.

How will enterprise backup evolve to adapt to the reality of the next ten years?

Since ransomware has become more prevalent recently, businesses have been compelled to reconsider offsite backups, including using less popular media like tape and optical WORM drives. One of the few methods for safeguarding data against malware is offsite data storage, which creates a barrier between production and backup systems.

However, doing so requires substantial expertise and effort. Data recovery from an offsite archive requires physical travel and safety for the backup media, which takes time. Additionally, there is always a chance that backup tapes have been infected with malware. In response, suppliers have introduced "immutable" backups. On the same kind of media as the primary system, immutable copies of data and snapshots of protection systems can be operated locally. This advancement greatly accelerates recovery.

Immutability will be a key characteristic of enterprise backup in the next decade. The best defense against the rising tide of ransomware attacks is having backups. Future developments can be seen in systems like Amazon's S3 object lock, which hides data behind a fictional air gap.

Suppliers anticipate that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will strengthen defenses by checking user behavior and applications for anomalies. These models will be updated frequently to stay current with new threats.

In essence, chief information officers should be able to take backups for granted that they are secure without taking further precautions. Self-defense for backup and storage will be possible thanks to real-time ransomware detection and automatic recovery features.

Hardware consolidation and the rise of flash media

Whether done internally through a cloud or backup-as-a-service provider, most backups are written to a spinning disk. Tape or an optical disk is still used for longer-term archiving. However, compared to solid-state storage, these formats are slower and less dependable. This will change as flash media's increased storage capacity decrease the pricing gap with legacy disks over the next decade. Performance, ease of use, and advantages in space, power, and cooling will spur increased use and tip the scales in favor of flash.

Additionally, suppliers anticipate hardware consolidation. As a result, it should be simpler to utilize capacity tiers to offer the best and most effective backup storage.

One method combines the benefits of the most recent hardware and software in hybrid cloud architecture or custom-made hyper-converged appliances. Enterprise backup entails deeper interaction with top platforms and hardware products. Additionally, it will be possible for a single tool to manage both short-term and long-term storage, saving enterprises from thinking about storage tiers.

Cloud and container support

Almost all suppliers anticipate backup tools will enable multi-cloud and hybrid cloud over the coming years if they don't already. This is motivated in part by compliance and practicality. The market for storage and backup as a service is expected to expand. Still, vendors believe businesses will continue to prefer localized backup services or those that guarantee data stays in a certain region. However, other data produced by cloud-native applications needs to be backed up close to the point of generation.

IT teams want to use only one backup solution for various software because using many solutions is disorganized, time-consuming, and ineffective. Businesses seek data backup and protection from as few vendors as possible, and this trend will be prominent over the coming ten years.

Container support will become a typical feature of enterprise backup tools as the use of containers increases. Data is anticipated to move between apps or containers more frequently, and backup must keep up with this.

Autonomic and continuous backups

The tendency for backups to operate automatically without user input or knowledge is arguably the most significant trend. This is done partly to lighten the pressure on IT teams and decrease human error. Backups and restores should be done faster, and systems should become more resistant to unintentional and intentional attacks. Additionally, this automatized method is less disruptive to daily operations and more transparent to the end user.

A continuous method may replace the usual monthly backup pattern during the next decade, which is the most promising course. The daily activities of selecting data sets to protect, checking protection data for problems, and automatically resolving those problems—self-provisioning, self-monitoring, and self-healing—will be increasingly handled by data protection tools.

Additionally, backup technologies will become more application- and context-aware, prioritizing where data is kept based on its importance, usage pattern, and how quickly the organization needs to recover. They will essentially establish their own service-level agreements, recovery points, and time goals. This is especially crucial for microservices and environments like Kubernetes since they will produce IT infrastructure that is difficult for people to manage manually.

Storage discipline

Backup and recovery technologies will evolve, and only some changes will be technical. It is anticipated that more regulation and a greater effort on the part of businesses to keep the correct data for the right amount of time. The companies will need a thorough understanding of their data assets.

Applications will become more resilient when backup and resilience are built into them. But businesses will need to be more diligent with their data to reap the benefits. As a result, compliance will be improved, and the workload on backup and recovery systems will be decreased. This discipline will become increasingly important as businesses collect increasingly more data.

Organizations must refrain from storing everything permanently. If organizations want to handle increasing sizes of datasets, they should maintain backups for recovery and store data for regulatory compliance and ransomware mitigation.