Data protection is on fire these days. Businesses anxious about migrating to foreign, off-premises cloud environments are demanding innovation in backup and recovery. These newfangled services aren’t just for companies all-in on cloud; they can also be a test bed for the cold-footed.

“Every time that you modernize production, you must also modernize protection,” said Jason Buffington (pictured, left), principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc.

The industry saw this when virtualization took over from bare metal 15 years ago; today, the shift is to cloud, according to Buffington, who joined Matt Waxman (pictured, right), vice president of product management, data protection, at Dell EMC, in a live interview at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Buffington and Waxman spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

The difficulty with modern data protection is that “cloud” is not a single, clear-cut destination. There are different private and public clouds, software-as-a-service clouds and so on. Applications are similarly diverse — on-premise, mission-critical apps, may require different protection than do cloud-native apps. The single best method for all is to protect and defend at the data level, Waxman stated.

“Getting really tight with that data source, I think, is the linchpin to an integrated data protection strategy,” he said.

Dell EMC is the parent company of VMware Inc. VMware recently made VMware Cloud available on Amazon Web Services. The companies worked closely to bring data protection IP, automation and integration into the application stack, according to Waxman. The management layer is designed for end-user self service, so customers can choose their data protection, as well as where and when to turn it on, he explained.

Data protection test dummy

Some customers may opt to try cloud-based data protection and recovery as a pilot for bigger, mission-critical application deployment in cloud. Many customers first experienced the power of virtual machines this way, Buffington stated.

“They said, ‘You know what; this stuff runs pretty well; they’re in a recovered state. Maybe I don’t want to go back. Maybe I could run production apps in that virtualized state,'” he said.

Likewise, data protection is a great way for nervous customers to dip their toe in cloud and build confidence before moving mission-critical apps there, Buffington concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE