How to evolve from “data protection” to “data management”

To evolve from backup to data protection is to embrace complementary mechanisms that enable a much broader range of preservation of data, protection of data, and the assurance of productivity through enhanced availability initiatives, as seen in ESG’s Spectrum of Data Protection.

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To evolve from data protection to data management is to get smarter on all of the iterations of data throughout an infrastructure, including not only the backups/snapshots/replicas/archives from data protection, but also the primary/production data and the copies of data created for non-protection purposes, like test/dev, analytics/reporting, etc.

Here’s a short video on Copy Data Management that hopefully explains the importance of CDM:

Quintessential ‘backup admins’ are in a unique position to potentially lead this evolution because:

  1. Admins have led many of the evolutions from backup to data protection.
  2. Some DP technologies already have the catalog and the controller (policy) that lend themselves to evolve from data protection to data management.
  3. They, perhaps more than most, understand the diversity of repositories of data that exist throughout an infrastructure.

To be clear, backup admins cannot achieve data management on their own — in fact, the stakeholders should include several groups across IT, non-IT business stakeholders, and other beneficiaries (such as test/dev, compliance, etc.). But if you put those folks in the room, and seek out authentic CDM technologies that can enable what has been envisioned, then you are on your way to data management.

As always, thanks for watching.

[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]

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