Data Management…Sorry, Intelligent Data Management 

Data management as a term will become better “qualified” and less of a catch-all that misses the point. Intelligent data management or the intelligent reuse of data will become more pervasive in 2020, making it a pivotal year for many backup and recovery vendors that now need to expand the personas they communicate with and sell to. We believe that the vendors that successfully morph their platforms to include instrumentation and workflows to make the sharing of compliant data easy will start building a lasting differentiation in the market. Look for “insights” features, data classification, self-service data reuse, compliance modules, data analytics-friendly workflows, and better BC/DR. Our research shows that this is the future of backup and recovery,¹ and we believe 2020 will confirm it.

^1. Source: ESG Research, Data Intelligence, to be published.

SaaS Backup and Recovery Become Higher Priorities

In 2020, SaaS backup and recovery will become a higher priority for end-users. Vendor education campaigns will increase awareness of the data protection issues associated with poorly understood SLAs and will accelerate adoption of protection solutions. In the enterprise space, Salesforce backup and recovery will become more visible as an issue, while Office 365 backup adoption becomes less differentiated across vendors, but still offers a large market opportunity in 2020 and beyond. Remember that SaaS applications may be highly available on the surface (outages have happened in the past and will likely happen again), but the data remains the customer’s responsibility.

Cloud Costs Start Hurting as Multi-cloud Support Becomes Critical

Cloud costs keep escalating, forcing organizations to reexamine their backup practices and methodologies. There’s a lot more than meets the eye with cloud environments as workloads become more mobile across multiple clouds and on-premises sources or destinations. With compute, egress, and ongoing storage driving up costs, we expect that a “reality check” will occur in many organizations. We may even see some repatriations to on-premises environments or topology optimizations driven by cloud costs. This may offer a great opportunity for MSPs and regional service providers to win business over hyper-scalers.

Multi-cloud support—true support—will become increasingly critical as end-users use multiple providers today and are looking to hedge their bets and build a flexible hybrid infrastructure.

DR Automation Advances

Moving the right data to the right place at the right time is what it’s always been about, and so hard to achieve. We expect to see more advances in this space driven by data optimization capabilities or services and data classification. High availability is going to become more widely “democratized” across segments, including the mid-market. Delivering on RPOs and RTOs will remain the top mandate for data protection IT leaders. The question becomes, which vendors and which implementations will actually deliver on these objectives? In 2020, we expect to see a lot more communication from vendors on actual recovery times and points instead of just marketing hype.

Tech note: The underpinning of these solutions is still a critical part of success here. They all have a lot of great features, but success of DR still depends on getting the data from point A to point B efficiently and in a timely manner. There seems to be two schools of thought here, VMware to VMware for site-to-site failover or a hypervisor conversion (VMware to public cloud hypervisor). The latter could incur a cloud cost penalty.

Appliances Remain Popular

Backup and recovery appliances are still popular. It’s a form factor that has proven itself over time, and they’re not going away any time soon. There is a marked evolution toward more software-defined approaches (think of LEGO building blocks where the software is the difference), with cloud in mind of course. Scale-out architectures/solutions are going to continue evolving in 2020 and be adopted by a growing number of users as vendors keep adding offerings to their portfolios.

Compliance Remains a Serious Exposure

GDPR made the news so many times in the past two to three years that it seems like old history. We believe it is still a serious risk exposure for many organizations. More regulations are coming online across the world and in the US that are strongly inspired by the spirit of GDPR. Data privacy is the extension of an individual’s rights to the data about them. For many organizations, knowing what data qualifies under the litany of regulations, what they have, where it is, and what they should do with it will remain a complex task in 2020…and likely for years to come. We expect that as a result of the intensification of auditing and litigation, we will see an acceleration in services and solutions that support the identification and classification of data; after all, it is the first step to compliance. We also expect to see current confidence levels among IT professionals drop as more challenges present themselves, audits take place, and fines are levied.

Container Backup and Recovery Accelerates

Container adoption is accelerating and so too is the requirement to properly protect container environments and the data in them. ESG research indicates that, so far, IT professionals are kicking the can down the road. Twenty-four percent of respondents say that data protection for containers will become as important as VM protection in 13 to 24 months, while another 24% say it will become so in more than 24 months.² This being said, we believe that there is going to be an acceleration of container backup and recovery initiatives in 2020. Very much like what we saw for VMware, newer approaches are needed. This time, however, we see a lot of attention and early support from incumbent vendors in the market. A few years ago, many vendors missed the VMware revolution, and one vendor came in and changed the market dynamics to become a powerhouse. We expect the container market to be more competitive sooner, starting in 2020. ESG thinks this is an area where application development and data protection must be tightly integrated. There will have to be some awareness or synchronization here around which containers need backup and which ones do not. And application consistency is critical as container usage expands. The recipe will likely include a healthy dose of Kubernetes.

^2. Source: ESG Master Survey Results, Data Protection Cloud Strategies, June 2019.

Tape Won’t Die…Again

Tape is not dead and just won’t die. Don’t expect to see its demise in 2020! Millions of tapes ship every year. It still represents a significant amount of backup and archive storage in the enterprise space, but it is clear from ESG research that cloud will start replacing tape in many environments. Thirty-one percent of organizations say that it is “extremely likely” that they would replace on-premises tape with cloud target solutions, and another 47% say it is “likely.” With numbers like these it is fair to say that cloud backup targets are primed to replace on-premises tape.³ In 2020, we expect that more focus will be placed on migrations of traditional tape management and infrastructure to cloud services. Deployments of isolated recovery (air-gapped) topologies that leverage tape could also see an acceleration as cyber criminals get more aggressive and sophisticated, specifically targeting backup data (think of it as “killing” the recovery mechanism). We will be looking more closely at this market and include the extensive use of tape by public cloud providers.

^3. ibid.

The Role of Channel Continues to Evolve with Cloud

What is a traditional channel partner or player these days in the space of backup and recovery? ESG research shows that channel partners still hold a high level of influence as trusted advisers with the end-users we surveyed.⁴ The traditional model of the trusted VAR who would sell servers, networking, software, and services to make it all work has, however, gradually dissipated with the advent of cloud strategies and the heavy push by hyper-scalers to capture backup and recovery workloads. Many vendor programs enable channel partners to effectively become service providers themselves and logically many VARS are now evolving their business models to act both as service providers and providers of a full range of value-added services for data protection. Many service provider generalists have become players in the backup and recovery space by leveraging powerful platforms that bring those capabilities together. With all these changes in mind, as business models continue to evolve in the channel in 2020, we will see an increased risk of disintermediation for channel players who do not adapt their business model to the new hybrid, cloud-driven topologies end-users now expect. We also see a great opportunity for those who do, and for the vendors who fully and credibly embrace service provider-like features or make it their core business, in particular in the mid-market.

^4. Source: ESG Master Survey Results, 2018 Data Protection Landscape Survey, November 2018.