Modern Data Protection

Foreword

As an IT storage technology journalist, I’ve been learning and writing about the data protection market for 20 years or more. In that time, the backup market and supplier landscape has developed in new directions and grown enormously. We have seen the rise of server virtualization, the provision of centrally-managed endpoint backup, the incredible growth of public clouds, and data protection within those clouds.

Suppliers have devised data protection for applications delivered as a service, such as Salesforce and Microsoft 365. The growth of containerization and cloud native applications has added a new dimension to both on-premises and public cloud backup and restoration. A further and highly important dimension has arrived with the ransomware threat and the need to make backups immutable through physical and virtual air gaps.

We have seen the arrival of data management suppliers who use backup as a means of protecting data, and of ingesting it for subsequent reuse and analysis. Data sovereignty has become an important subject of interest in the data protection sphere. And another quite recent development is the SaaS approach: data-protection-as-a-service (DPaaS).

Throughout this time, one authority has remained constant: W. Curtis Preston. He has always seemed to have a clear line of sight to all of these developments, and insight into their implications on users and data protection processes, procedures, and planning.

His latest book is necessary because so many developments ...