What I am thankful for – as a backup guy

First and foremost, I am so thankful for the job that I have and the ESG family members that I share it with. It has been an amazing year that I cannot say “thank you” enough times for.  I am also very thankful to the ESG family of data protection companies that have welcomed me into their strategy meetings, their roadmap discussions and the stages of their launch events and webcasts. Please know that your trust is sincerely treasured, and I am humbled by the privilege to collaborate with you.

Those are the big ones, the other (backup) stuff that I am grateful for:

– I am grateful how server virtualization has flipped the IT world upside down. Along with solving bare metal recovery and many server migration/availability scenarios, it has truly forced a reassessment of traditional data protection strategies and mechanism. And just when we thought virtualization was starting to commoditize, private/hybrid cloud architectures changes the mix again. The question of “can I back up my VM’s” is more universally addressed, so now the more interesting conversation of “How agile can my restores be?” can be the focus.

– I am grateful for how “the cloud” gives new data protection capabilities to businesses that thought that BC/DR was unattainable, or helped over-worked SMB IT Pro’s sleep a little better by getting extra help and offloading some of their backup chores.

– I am grateful that everybody thinks it’s a good idea to bring their own devices to work. Not because it may/may‑not add to their productivity, but because it does truly force IT to recognize how much of their precious corporate data lives on endpoint devices – and drives conversations from IT Pro’s to Exec’s on how are they going to secure that data, from loss, corruption or even the employees themselves.

– I am grateful that most folks have figured out that “better together” is more than a marketing slogan when thinking about old data protection debates like snapshots/backups, disk/tape, onprem/cloud, etc.


All four of those topics are forcing everybody to rethink their data protection strategies, including new discussion contributions from execs, application-owners and backup folks – conversations that should have been happening before, but are good to be occurring now.  And selfishly speaking, with so much change and new conversations happening, it means that we as an industry have not yet “solved” data protection, which implies that I will hopefully continue to have an exciting career that stimulates my imagination and surrounds me with mentors and friends.

As a backup‑dude, I truly have the best job in the world … THANK YOU !

[Cross-posted on ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]

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