Inquiry Spotlight: Backup, Q2 2009

Backup is one of the most critical day-to-day responsibilities for IT operations. You must have a recent backup of your critical data to recover from accidental deletions, system crashes, disk failures, and data corruption. But backup is complex, error prone, and getting more difficult as data storage increases at a rate of 30% or more every year. Between May 2008 and May 2009, Forrester answered 83 end user inquiries on backup, independent of disaster recovery. Topics included overall backup strategy, virtual tape libraries (VTLs), deduplication, tape encryption, and tape hardware. Deduplication as a standalone topic as well as part of overall backup strategy generated more than 27 inquiries. Companies want to know how deduplication facilitates more cost-effective backup to disk but also how deduplication plus replication solves remote office challenges. End users still had plenty of questions about tape, including off-site tape vaulting services and tape encryption options. So while deduplication paves the way to more data backed up and stored to disk, it's clear that tape still remains a part of most companies' backup strategy.