Copy Data Management (CDM) and all the permutations of “Copy” “Data” “Management” with or without additional terms like “Active” “Enterprise” “Virtualization,” etc., seems to be the rage these days. A few years ago, there was only one visionary company talking about CDM. Today, we see a range of vendors now claiming to be CDM, even when they don’t deliver the breadth of capabilities that the industry may have presumed CDM to be; and others who have been quietly delivering those capabilities and more, without the terminology (a.k.a. they were CDM before CDM was cool).
For all those reasons, and with sarcasm intended on the naming variations, ESG has been referring to the space as Data Management and Enablement (DM&E) instead of CDM. Because in reality, you aren’t trying to (M)anage (C)opies, you’re supposed to be (M)anaging the (D)ata. Every (C)opy needs to be intentional and automated in its creation, retention, and deletion; while all of us need to do better in our use/re-use of the data through (E)nablement to those that need access to the (D)ata, for protection, retention, availability, and other business-accelerating purposes.
As with most transformational aspects of IT, there isn’t just one way to achieve DM&E-like zen-ness. With at least fundamental approaches:
Evolution – start with the data protection technologies (and vendors) that you know, and evolve from just making copies (backup) to being much more agile and leveraging the copies that you need while being smarter about getting rid of the ones that you don’t.
Revolution – start over by reimagining primary and secondary storage in a unified strategy, where DM&E capabilities, as well as foundational backup/recovery, are all just byproducts from a fresh start.
This is an over-simplified view, but perhaps it helps in trying to understand the landscape of what will assuredly change the landscape of data protection, preservation, availability, and management as our industry moves forward. Perhaps this video will help too.
Look for ESG to provide broader coverage of DM&E (or CDM for SEO purposes), as we have research underway that we’re looking forward to sharing with folks PDQ or at least ASAP. And if you are a vendor in this space, let’s talk more about what you’re doing, not doing, should be doing, or could be doing in it.
As always, thanks for watching.