Recovering information: What about plan B?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Having an insurance cover for your most precious IT organs is way more of a gobbledygook than it was yesterday. The premium you pay is not just in license money or support bucks but also in heavy denominations of headaches about downtime, data-pull-out time windows, unplanned outages, human errors, technical goof-ups and nature's wrath striking the business at a wrong time and swiping information-and-reputation away with a terrible mood swing.

To top that, there's an avalanche of new-fangled approaches like cloud recovery or Business Continuity Appliances o virtualized back-up or automated DR (Disaster Recovery) and more. Has the space suddenly turned like a disaster-struck site piled with chaos and complications or has it only stretched your menu card a bit too much?

Sample this. As per some gleanings from results of an Iron Mountain(R) Incorporated survey in March 2013 of IT professionals at small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in America, the use or preference of magnetic tape cartridges as part of their strategy to backup data is still high on the ladder. It shows how tape remains a priority foundation and it could be due to perceptions on cost effectiveness, longevity, multi-purpose abilities and ease of use.

What is notable though is that 94 per cent respondents using or planning to use tape do so as part of a hybrid solution, with the majority (67 per cent) picking tape backup in conjunction with shared storage, and some 44 per cent reeling it in with direct-attached storage or external hard drives. In fact, just a quarter of respondents were found on the side of cloud-based or online backup services.

Now have a quick peek at a Symantec's 2013 Cloud Survey, wherein one can spot how most organizations have been shown using three or more solutions to back-up their physical, virtual and cloud data-leading to increased IT inefficiencies, risk and training costs. It accentuates then that 43 per cent of organizations have lost cloud data while some 68 per cent have experienced recovery failures.

It argues further that most still assess cloud recovery as a slow, tedious process with only 32 per cent tagging it as fast and 22 per cent saying it would take three or more days to recover from a catastrophic loss of data in the cloud; thus highlighting that the simplicity of provisioning which is quintessential to Clouds can also translate into inefficient cloud storage. This becomes grossly underlined when the survey contends that cloud storage utilization is surprisingly low at 17 per cent. 

In short, while choices are expanding, storage or back-up or recovery of information is undergoing some tectonic shifts. And these become all the more intimidating for the vague silence that surrounds them, just like an impending storm. Confusion and lack of clarity surely is in full torrents in this terrain.

We attempt to comb some tangled layers like appliances, cloud recovery genre, hardware's relevance and more in this interview while Michael Crest, GM, Data Management Customer Solutions Unit, CA Technologies travels to India this week.

Cloud recovery is often caught up anchored wrongly with the old connotations of recovery management. Would you agree that Cloud genre should have a different context than erstwhile models, specially when it is often argued that plain dumping-in-a-cloud won't work unless robust run, restart and stand-by capabilities are ensured?

These are definitely going to be some limitations. Cloud has some inherent latency and bandwidth challenges. More so, in public clouds. There is a block but then rationalisation of infrastructure gives a specific cost advantage too which cannot be ignored. Customer has to ask as to why they would choose a Cloud alternative. It has specific advantaged specially for those from SMB and mid-market segments.

From disks and tapes to appliances (physical BCAs and then virtual BCAs), the way we think of Disaster and recovery management has undergone some big shifts. What do you make of these changes?

In some circles, appliances are showing some uptick, specially with a certain set of customers. At the same time, it's a slow motion growth with others. It's a change worth noting but the growth is not to the degree that was anticipated. Virtualisation though stays a key trend.

Can we surmise that this space is leaning more towards software and services, and being weaned off hardware increasingly?

So much is changing. Look at how SDN (Software Defined Networking) is the talk of the town now. Trends are coming at great pace. Some hardware would definitely get commoditised, but some of it will continue to play a strong role. We are trying to orient solutions in a way that unified data solutions do not require anyone to relegate towards a particular hardware platform.

Is that what makes your Private Cloud Accelerator (with VCE VBlock) distinct from competition? What is distinct it from IBM CloudBurst or HP's CloudSystem Matrix?

We deliver choice and capability unlike lock-in scenarios that others offer. Cloud is going to be a big wave and customers will have distributed workloads across ecosystems and they definitely need choice around platforms and environments. Therefore the ability to tie two worlds together is crucial. Doing that in a unified manner is important whether it is about tape-side experience with image-based back-ups or Amazon like partners. We see this new world as a hybrid world unlike others. In India there is so much opportunity to virtualise and to rationalize. Private Cloud is going to be the first step in this journey.

What does an Indian CIO need from what you have gathered so far?

Apart from what we see on the surface, CIOs also need to ensure in-house applications are well delivered and internal constituents are managed well. There is a lot of technology revolution happening and Indian customers, specially SMBs can have a lot to gain here,

How much have we managed to solve the good-old security headaches? How does India stand here?

It is always a pervasive concern no matter where you are. These factors are going to be there but security is on an improvement mode also. We work on that area strongly whether it's with the partner ecosystem and also while giving a lot of range. Recovery times can become a challenge but a lot of technology and capability side of work is underway with facets like deduplication and more.

When one thinks of data management and that too on a unified plate, is it possible for the offering to be too complicated and at time, even redundant for an Indian customer specially?

India is a different space than other markets. Choice, licensing and flexibility are vital forces. We try to iron out complications and offer custom-made choices for data back-ups. Interestingly, a survey just showed us how about 29 per cent customers here may not have a comprehensive back-up plan. In the upcoming quarters we would be coming up with many offerings to enable customers to migrate comprehensively and easily.