Is Your Data Protection Strategy Suffering a Civil War?

I am a huge fan of the Marvel movies. Each of the individual hero movies has done an awesome job contributing to the greater albeit fictional universe. Each of the heroes has their unique role to play within the Avengers team. And yet, in the latest movie that released on Blu-Ray today, it appears as if this colorful array of heroes is divided.  They have similar goals, but what seems to be opposing methods that put them at odds with each other. Data protection can have similar contradictions.

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The Spectrum of Data Protection activities can seem similar.  We often talk about the spectrum as a holistic perspective on the myriad of data protection outcomes—and the potentially diverse tools that enable those outcomes.  And yet, sometimes, the spectrum can appear opposed to itself:

  • Some in your organization are focused on “data management” (governance, retention, and compliance) which focuses on how long you can or should retain data in a cost-effective way that unlocks the value of the data.
  • Others in your organization are focused on “data availability” (assured availability and BC/DR), as part of ensuring the users’ and the business’ productivity.

Do these goals actually contradict?  No.

But … you have to start with the core of what is common: data protection, powered by a complementary approach of backup, snapshots, and replication. But as backup evolves to data protection, many come to a crossroads where that evolution only goes down one path or the other—data management or data availability.

We’ll have to wait until next year to see how the Avengers reconciles to a single team again—but you can’t afford to wait that long. Start with your core focus areas and then evolve toward the edges, as opposed to coming from the edges in.

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

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