Even with the recession taking its toll on many sectors and businesses, an area of the IT space i.e. the data backup and recovery industry is still witnessing rapid growth. This is because of the burgeoning need for data backups that are being felt by almost all firms (big or small) that have significant IT operations. With the IDC predicting a 30 percent increase in data usage every year, it is the case that data that an organization has to store would double every three years. Coupled with the emerging trend towards using the cloud as a backup alternative, the prospects for Disaster Recovery (DR) industry in 2013 are looking good. To top up the good news, with many firms taking backups of backups just in case they need to recover from a VM (Virtual Machine), there is a whole lot of demand for DR firm.
The biggest business driver for the DR industry in 2013 would be the move from tape-based backups to disk based backups. Firms increasingly are beginning to realize that tape based backups pose a whole set of problems including the security aspect, as they have to be moved from onsite to the backup location. Further, the aspects of corrupted tapes, blank tapes, and missing files make the tape based backups unreliable. However, this is not to say that tape based backups would be sunset as many firms realize that over the longer term, having tapes is an advantage. With regulatory rulings demanding a decade of data to be backed up, tape based backups are going to be around for some more years.
The next big driver for the DR industry is the emerging trend of disk-based backup wherein the growth in this method would drive the disk sales as well as services of technical personnel who have expertise in this field. With the still nascent cloud as a backup option yet to take off in a big way especially for larger businesses, the transition from the earlier paradigm to the cloud-based paradigm would have a prominent role for the tape-based backups in 2013. The key aspect here is that the DR industry is an inflection point and the tape-based backups are the intermediate stage before the full-fledged transition to cloud takes place.
Of course, many believe that the transition to cloud might not take place after all as the time it takes to restore the backups from the cloud is still not commercially viable. Considering the fact that businesses lose over $ 70,000 per hour of outage, the lengthier times that are part of the cloud recovery rule out any immediate move to the cloud paradigm. An emerging trend that is of consequence here is the use of the cloud as a backup of the backup which would greatly benefit those firms that do not have huge offsite backup facilities. Maybe, this is one driver in the DR market for 2013 that is not getting the attention it deserves.
To wrap things up, 2013 looks to be a promising year for the DR industry and notwithstanding the concerns of a double dip looming ahead, one can safely that the exponential increase in data generation should take care of any lingering worries about the slowdown. It needs to be remembered that any business has to necessarily backup data in any economic condition and this alone should be enough to drive growth in the DR industry. A couple of months into the New Year, it is safe to say that things are indeed looking up.
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