One of the “most pressing problems that plague IT since the dawn of computing.”  That’s how Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante explains backup, offering his view and solution in a featured segment this week (see full clip below).

According to Vellante, the fundamental issue about backup is that it delivers no tangible business value – “it’s essentially insurance,” he says, and expensive insurance at that. For every dollar enterprises spend on primary storage between 50 and 60 cents are spent on backup and recovery.  To make things worse, the technology is also incredibly complex.

“Why is it that backup is so complicated? Well, there are a lot of moving pieces to the backup system. Consider an Oracle environment today: you have a database, and applications that are using that database,” Vellante explains.  “There are file shares that need to be backed up, there is a backup utility within the database, say RMAN for example, and there is a backup server hosting an application that orchestrates the backup and recovery flow for this environment. And of course there is a target backup device and probably a replicated device offsite.”

Each of these components stores metadata in a propriety format, locking the user in their dated backup environment. That’s one of the things that must change.

Dropping the paradigm

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The way out of the current paradigm is the services-oriented approach. Backup should not be an afterthought bolted on an organization’s infrastructure – it must be tailored to individual business processes and consumed as a service.

Vellante says that the transition to backup-as-a-service begins at the organizational level, and adds from a technical standpoint — it should not involve a costly rip and replace. An abstracted orchestration layer should be slotted into a company’s existing backup solution, and apps can be migrated gradually over time.

Vellante outlines four “high level enablers” that can make backup-as-a- a reality for organizations in his video below.

photo credit: mortimer? via photopin cc