The Year of Data Protection

Happy New Year!

As another milestone in the progress of storage networking is reached, we at Byte and Switch have taken the opportunity for lots of predictive reflection, as we show in the stories below:

In looking forward and behind, we see many trends unfolding. And as we note in today's list of predictions, one of the biggest is data protection. (See Top Storage Predictions for 2007.)

This catch-all term emerged in mid-2006, and for a while we dismissed it as the logical successor to another awful marketing phrase: information lifecycle management. But it's turning out that data protection is one of those rare buzzwords that, in fact, has substance behind it.

It's not just a synonym for backup, archiving, or compliance, either. While data protection embraces all those, it also extends to security issues like encryption, disaster recovery, and the human factor. (See VA Reports Massive Data Theft and Portable Problems Prompt IT Spending.)It doesn't take a genius or a call to the Psychic Friends Network to know that when something like the National Data Awareness Project was launched last month, it was emblematic of what's coming. (See Data Protection Group Launches.)

Is it because the term data protection makes explicit the business imperative behind storage? Perhaps. We expect that starting a budget discussion with the phrase "data protection" will go a lot further than "We need more drives."

Already, data protection has been the driving force behind lots of M&A activity. (See EMC Secures RSA for $2.1B, NetApp Grabs Topio, and Symantec Swallows Revivio.) We don't anticipate that will change in the next 12 months only accelerate.

Data protection is also at the heart of most of the technology trends that will continue to shape the industry in the year ahead, namely, wide area file services, de-duplication, and virtual tape libraries.

Indeed, the more we see that data protection describes the multifaceted aspects of storage, the more the term grows on us. Frankly, it's a lot sexier than the yawns or blank stares that "storage" sometimes induces.And so we make the relatively small leap and predict you'll be hearing a lot more on this topic in this new year (and not just because it resonates with us).

We think it's a safe bet to call 2007 a banner year for data protection.

— Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch