About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Tracy Stokes is a principal analyst serving CMOs. She is an expert on building brands through deep consumer understanding. Her research focuses on how to build your brand in a post-digital age.
Tracy has more than 15 years of global consumer marketing experience in the CPG and retail/fashion industries. Prior to Forrester, Tracy led global brand marketing at Timberland, employing a customer-focused approach to rejuvenate the outdoor brand. As a brand marketer at Johnson & Johnson's Neutrogena, she built facial care categories in North America and led strategic brand development in Asia, including launching Neutrogena in China. Tracy began her career as an account manager for a boutique advertising agency in London.
Tracy earned an M.B.A., with a concentration in marketing, from The Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She also holds an M.A. in American studies from Purdue University and a B.A. in American studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), in my opinion, is one of the most exciting areas I look at. To me, using the cloud for disaster recovery (DR) purposes makes perfect sense: the cloud is an...
Backup is not the sexiest process in infrastructure and operations; it's akin to getting your teeth cleaned: necessary, but often painful. Many enterprises struggle with exponential data growth,...


Road Map: The Business Technology Resiliency Playbook
This report outlines Forrester's solution to help IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders develop their road map of business technology (BT) resiliency tools using Forrester's...

We live in a time when customers expect services to be delivered non-stop, without interruption, 24x7x365. Need proof? Just look at the outrage this week stemming from RIM's 3+ day BlackBerry...
It should come as no surprise that websites thrive on traffic. So naturally, it follows that driving traffic to your site is a strong motivation for any company looking to grow their web presence....
We have an urgent need to understand top reasons firms (particularly larger end of market) use third-party services such as those we provide, such as colocation, managed hosting, replication, and...
The world may or may not be ending on December 21, 2012. I'm not an expert on the ancient Maya (although I've climbed many Mayan pyramids and have long been fascinated by their history, see...
What are some strategies or best practices to test the backup tapes to make sure they have the right data? What are the best practices in verifying that our backups are backed up correctly?
I've got backup on the brain. I guess this isn't an unusual occurrence for me, but it's also been bolstered by a week at Symantec Vision, a week at EMC World, as well as backup...
In today’s world of 24x7x365 global operations and competition, downtime results not only in immediate lost revenue and productivity, but also in lasting damage to corporate...
The First Of Many IT Ops-Focused SaaS Offerings
It's been almost two years since we last produced this report, and during that time the vendor landscape has changed considerably; however, one constant remains true: Backup is a struggle for both...
Although a business impact analysis (BIA) is a key part of putting together a disaster recovery plan, many companies neglect to conduct one. Forrester believes it's worthwhile to take a step back and...
One thing that I’ve found in common across infrastructure and operations groups of all shapes and sizes is that they are continually searching for the ideal set of key performance indicators. A...
Here's how Amazon ruined* my Christmas: after devouring a lovely rib roast with a porcini-spinach stuffing (recipe here in case your stomach is now growling), we all curled up on the couch...
Recent outages from Amazon and Google have got me thinking about resiliency in the cloud. When you use a cloud service, whether you are consuming an application (backup, CRM, email, etc), or just...
I woke up this morning to interesting news: Dell announcing that they acquired backup software company AppAssure, marking the first acquisition made by John Swainson, the new president of Dell...
Key Takeaways That Can Help You Strengthen Your Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Plans
In late October 2012, Superstorm Sandy barreled through the Caribbean and the eastern US, affecting almost half of the states in the US. The storm left millions without access to basic...
Business Case: The Business Technology Resiliency Playbook
This report outlines Forrester's guidance for a business technology resiliency (BTR) business case. This is a critical step when securing funding because management is often reluctant to fund...

Over the past several months, I've been receiving a lot of questions about replication for continuity and recovery. One thing I've noticed, however, is that there is a lot of confusion around...
Can you please provide guidelines for auditing a DR plan? Also, have there been significant changes in the DR services provider landscape?
Organization: The Business Technology Resiliency Playbook
Who? What? Where? When? How? It's the question of "who?" that often stymies infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals when it comes to business technology (BT) resiliency programs. Who is...

Protecting The Corporate PCs Is As Important As Protecting Servers
What's your reaction to this scenario? Your CEO leaves his laptop, full of mission-critical (but encrypted) data, in a cab. One frantic phone call later and we learn that a far-sighted employee had...
What are some industry best practices for data integrity versus service availability? How about for active-passive versus active-active solutions?
What are the various technologies for quick disaster recovery suitable for distances between the main data center (DC) and the backup DC of 30 km (18.6 miles), 80 km (49.7 miles), and 200 km (124.3...