Backup and Disaster Recovery Predictions for 2019 with Druva

With 2018 coming to a close, it’s time to look to the future. Professionals in the backup and disaster recovery space are reevaluating the trends and errors of this year in order to prepare for 2019. Through this process, buyers learn which solutions are worth focusing on. We had the opportunity to speak with Prem Ananthakrishnan, VP of Products at Druva, and got his backup and disaster recovery predictions for 2019.

Druva provides data availability and governance for virtual machines and physical servers with a unique cloud-first approach by combining high performance, scalable backup, disaster recovery, and analytics. We feature Druva in our free Backup and Disaster Recovery Buyer’s Guide.

“Data Protection” is Giving Way to Data Management

As data becomes more valuable, businesses are trying to get the biggest bang for their buck. Having the ability to easily access data through data management allows organizations to operate more efficiently, and therefore keep up with their competition. This means that data management solutions will likely become a bigger priority in the coming year.

Prediction: “The ability to protect data and restore backed up files is no longer sufficient for modern business. Data has become the fuel for company success, driving insights, customer targeting, business planning, and even training AI and machine learning models. Any way to extract additional value from it is critical to business success and the shift to data management is key, where data is not only protected, but properly archived, easily searchable, can be leveraged for analytics, and is compliant the entire time.”

2019 is the Year of Government Data Compliance

With GDPR already in effect, and the California Consumer Privacy Act going into effect in 2020, compliance has become a bigger concern for businesses. The introduction of these regulations suggests that there will be an increased number of similar policies in the future, which will likely make day-to-day operations more complex.

Prediction: “Data management is no longer simply a consumer vs corporation battle, it has quickly elevated to the country and federal level. In the wake of GDPR, others are using it as a blueprint to enact more stringent compliance standards. The California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect January 2020 and we should expect to see more of the same in the coming years.  Such regulations mean company obligations will become more complicated and will need to meet new standards. Having the flexibility and scalability to store data within specific regions will become a key buying consideration and increasingly favor cloud deployments over on-premises solutions.”

The Rise of Smart Clouds

The role of data has changed, making it harder to exclusively depend on traditional, on-prem backup and disaster recovery practices. Because of this, the use of clouds with AI and machine learning capabilities will likely grow in popularity in order to better manage data.

Prediction: “The adoption of streaming data capture from IoT and sensors, data governance policies, security standards, expanded data curation and compilation, widespread adoption of AI, and machine learning have made it impossible to rely completely on on-premises solutions. Technologies such as AI, machine learning, and analytics thrive in environments with expansive amounts of data and compute abilities beyond those available in on-premises solutions. These trends greatly favor cloud-based architectures, and will only increase as vendors offer more advanced solutions.”

The Cloud Wars Will Escalate in 2019

The technological landscape is changing. As data spreads and becomes more difficult to manage, it’s likely that organizations will turn away from on-prem solutions in favor of the cloud, due to the flexibility it provides.

Prediction: “Serverless architecture will drive down costs even further, and I would expect hybrid to become more popular with pushes from VMware and AWS. Online marketplaces will shift spending from offline distribution and vendors, and resellers will increasingly adopt digital VAR-like models. Machine learning and AI will continue to rise in adoption and increase the allure of cloud computing. Because of these technologies, public cloud will become the de-facto choice for developers.”