There is hardly a company that develops software that has not addressed the topic of containers by now. Definitely not a single enterprise has not taken a critical look at its current backup infrastructure in recent months. In the process, it became and still often becomes clear that these two topics have a great deal of overlap.
Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA at Pure Storage, explains what these look like, how best to deal with them in practice and what this means for the future of IT in many companies:
“Over the next decade, several approaches will become the standard for backups in enterprise environments. For example, the adoption of containers is accelerating to drive enterprise agility, scalability and efficiency. Enterprises transform data-intensive and critical applications to leverage modern architectures. At the heart of this paradigm is extreme automation, because human interactions simply cannot meet the demands of modern application architectures. Just as Veeam began as a backup platform focused on virtual machines and expanded its reach, solutions for containers, and especially containerized applications, will become more prevalent. This involves backing up the entire application and configuration. The scale of data protection in containers will increase as Kubernetes becomes more prevalent for critical, data-intensive applications. Automation of backup processes is essential to support the advantages of this dynamic and scalable platform.
Multi-cloud backup
Backup for multi-clouds will come into focus. Despite the adoption of multi-cloud approaches, each cloud tends to be a “walled garden” where data sets remain within one cloud provider; this benefits the hosting cloud provider. With increasing regulation – such as e.g. Through DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act in the European Union) – ensuring cloud provider resilience is becoming increasingly important. Central to this is the ability to easily and cost-effectively perform backups and restores in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, without obstacles such as control plane constraints or punitive cloud provider data leakage costs that today hinder data mobility and business agility. With cloud providers experiencing explosive data growth, this will become a high priority and a challenge for network providers, business models and customer budgets.
Flash is catching on
For data protection target platforms, the transition from hard drives to flash storage will accelerate as flash capacities increase and costs approach parity on a cost per effective TB basis. It is to be expected that in the medium term a price parity between hard disks and flash will be reached. In the process, performance, simplicity, and space, power and cooling advantages are driving further adoption and tipping the balance toward flash, leading to wider adoption in businesses.
No longer storing everything forever
Companies will try to limit the size of their backup data sets by establishing policies that avoid a “store everything forever” end state, and ensure that those policies are followed. This is the only way organizations can maintain backups for recovery purposes, regulatory compliance, and ransomware mitigation as data sets continue to grow over the next five to ten years, especially for unstructured data.”