I had dinner last night with a company that makes backup reporting software.  They have great technology, and the discussion made me think about the reporting market.

As my readers know, I believe that data protection is critical.  Companies must ensure that backup and recovery operations are completed in a timely and effective manner or they are at risk for an outage.  The idea of reporting on the efficacy of backup and recovery operations is a critical component of understanding whether data is protected.  Clearly all backup applications embed some level of reporting to provide this information, but is it enough?

Each customer has different reporting needs and requirements and the base reporting functionality included in all backup application is likely sufficient for many environments.  However, there is an ecosystem of companies (including the backup ISVs themselves) who sell very granular reporting tools.  These applications provide much richer reporting and often incorporate broader monitoring of other datacenter components.  These features are valuable, but the benefit likely varies by end user.  The basic functionality may be sufficient for smaller, homogeneous environments while larger datacenters with disparate hardware will likely see more value from advanced reporting.

This situation has made me wonder how my readers manage and report on their data protection environments, and I created the survey question below to gain your insights.

Thank you in advance for your participation; all comment feedback is welcome too.

[Cross-posted at About Restore]