What’s Next For Corporate Data? 5 Predictions For 2020

Penny Gralewski

How will data protection environments change in 2020? All indicators show demands for more flexibility, support for a broader range of new technologies and an urgent need for scalable systems that can manage massive data growth.

Here are my data protection predictions for 2020 (I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on these topics):

1. Multi-cloud adoption will drive diverse data protection requirements. As organizations adopt more clouds for different business needs, fast, flexible data protection requirements will increase. Organizations are choosing different clouds for different use cases.

Today’s data protection platform needs to accommodate cloud use cases like PaaS, containers, and massive databases like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Splunk, SAP HANA and Oracle.

Join a short webinar to learn “How to Optimize Data Protection of Cloud PaaS” with Commvault and be ready for 2020.

2. Weather-related natural disasters will demand recovery readiness.  Natural disasters are everywhere. Winter started early in the U.S.; there was a constant stream of hurricanes; wildfires raged in Australia and California; Venice had historic flooding; and drought is affecting Southern Africa. If we can learn one thing from the headlines, it’s that weather is unpredictable – and the impact weather has on organizations is also unpredictable.

That means organizations need to be ready – ready to recover from a flood; ready to transfer backups of mission critical applications over to another cloud region; ready for the unexpected power outages that put disaster recovery plans in motion. How confident is your organization that it is ready for a weather-related natural disaster?

Below, learn how U.S. insurance leader GEICO has a data protection strategy that is ready for anything – including the unpredictability of a hurricane.

3. Office 365 adoption will demand an updated data protection strategy. In October, Microsoft announced that Office 365 surpassed 200 million active commercial monthly users. That is a lot of data to back up and recover. As organizations adopt SaaS-based office productivity like Office 365 or the Google Suite, it’s important to think about where this business-critical data fits in your backup and recovery plan.  

No organization should need to purchase point products to support Office 365 adoption. Data protection for Office 365 should be an integrated part of your regular data protection platform.  Keep in mind you’ll need to protect more than just mailboxes. Sure, it’s critical to back up and recover data contained within the mailbox: messages; contacts; calendar items; chat histories; and deleted items. Keep in mind you also need to be concerned with backup and recovery for critical business information in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Project Online and Teams.

More organizations will move to integrated Office 365 data protection as part of their overall data protection strategy. Learn more about Office 365 data protection requirements in an Osterman Research whitepaper.

4. The IT hiring gap will drive modern technology adoption. Highly skilled, qualified IT leaders are difficult to find in the current job market. That means IT professionals looking for a new career will take a hard look at an organization’s technology before accepting a job.

Today’s job seekers do not want remedial work like touching thousands of servers with each upgrade – they want modern data protection solutions with automation, AI and the capabilities to accommodate cutting-edge technologies. New hires will likely bring in new technologies to speed the work of data protection and better secure data across the organization.

Learn what new technology can do for your IT team. Watch the Commvault GO innovation keynote video below to see how to kick off the disaster recovery workflow for an Azure failover from just a mobile phone SMS command.

5. Old backup point products will be replaced. It’s a constant topic – retiring legacy point backup products or backup products that no longer meet the needs of multi-cloud, hybrid and expanding organizations. 

It’s not just the maintenance hassle and the recovery time; it’s the clunky UX, the feeling that pieces and parts were stuck together and the lack of control. Enterprises and agencies of all sizes understand they need a single dashboard to control comprehensive data protection across multi-cloud and on-premises data environments, and the growing volume of workloads across applications, databases and virtual machines.

Check out five important questions to ask before you renew, a new whitepaper that details the changing data protection landscape.

New year, new decade – new data protection predictions?

What are your data protection predictions for 2020? How will a new decade usher in changes around data privacy, data migration and enterprise search?

We look forward to even more data protection conversations in 2020.