I’m just a little over thirty days into my role at Evaluator Group covering various aspects of Data Management including Data Protection and Secondary Storage. Even with a good understanding of the technology and what vendors are doing in this space, I’ve been drinking from the proverbial firehose getting caught up on the detailed analysis done by my colleagues on the myriad of Data Protection vendors and solutions we cover. I’m excited to be part of the Evaluator Group team and add my perspectives to the analyses.
There are some important changes happening in the Data Protection market and I believe this segment is as dynamic as ever. The Data Protection requirements of customers have never been wider, and the number and type of solutions have never been greater. Software vendors continue to enhance their solutions by bringing in new data management and visibility to the data they manage working through the backup process. Hardware vendors continue to build on technology advancements to deliver more performance, increased scalability, and enhanced efficiencies. Other vendors are evolving secondary storage systems to be scale out architectures that grow as customers needs grow, scale without data migration and often support integration with public clouds. A few vendors are combining all the hardware and software into hyperconverged secondary storage systems that promise fast deployment and ease of use within an enterprise’s data protection activities.
With the explosion of data and the rapid move towards hybrid IT environments using one or more private or public clouds, we see a number of organizations evaluating their Data Protection strategies and solutions and determining they need to make changes to meet evolving business and legal requirements. To help our customers evaluate what these changes mean for them, we will be making some changes and additions to our coverage of this market segment. We’re starting with Data Protection, updating product analyses as needed, adding an Eval(u)Scale™ assessment to product briefs, and thinking about how we can update the Evaluation Matrices to reflect the changes in the industry while maintaining much of the historic information that our users depend on.
Expanding beyond Data Protection, we are planning additional coverage into multiple aspects of Enterprise Data Management. Data Management is about knowing everything about your data, everywhere it is, and deriving more value from that data while still protecting it and optimizing its storage. Many of the Data Management concepts are not new to IT administrators and Evaluator Group analysts have covered the management of data from a number of perspectives. The opportunity here is to organize all this expertise into a comprehensive, integrated approach to Data Management.
We’ll have more information on what’s driving changes in Data Protection in the next blog and details about Data Management coverage as well as our insights in future blogs.
