The nice folks at Windows IT Pro magazine recently published an article that I wrote on Data Protection Manager within Microsoft System Center 2012.
According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research, the number-one IT spending priority in 2012 was improving data backup and recovery, tied with increased use of server virtualization. Interestingly enough, improving business continuity or disaster recovery (BC/DR) scored in the top 10 as well. There are a few key reasons:
- First, commoditization of virtualization has made many IT processes easier but makes backups more difficult.
- Second, data is growing faster than most organizations can manage it, and legacy backup solutions are choking to keep up.
- Other factors include an ever-growing reliance on IT (forcing raised prioritization of BC/DR) and the consumerization of IT (causing new protection scenarios for privately owned endpoint devices).
Add the growing complexities of backing up and recovering Microsoft workloads (e.g., Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange Server, Hyper-V, Windows Server file services), and you can understand why Microsoft started building its own data-protection solution.