Monitoring and management of backups becomes more challenging

Monitoring of backups has long been a necessary chore for IT professionals, but a report out today shows that new issues are also impacting the category and creating greater challenges.

The study from Bocada, a company which specializes in the automation of backup reporting and monitoring, is based on a survey of over 260 IT professionals. Varied environments and growing data volumes are revealed as a major concern, with securing data across backup applications the most-cited backup management challenge, followed by protecting growing data volume.

Backup professionals expect over 60 percent of their operations to transition to the cloud within three years, leading to backup professionals citing cloud backup oversight as a top backup management concern.

There's a surprising lack of automation, with nearly two-thirds of backup professionals reporting zero automation applied to recurring backup management activities. However, nearly 50 percent anticipate introducing at least some automation implementation over the next two years.

Operations are expected to become more closely tied to cyber security too, with 47 percent of backup professionals expecting greater incorporation of backup monitoring within cybersecurity programs. This makes it the number one trend they anticipate impacting their category in the next three to five years.

"What's remarkable about these findings is that they show increasing complexity entering the backup management space," says Matt Hall, Bocada's CEO. "Age-old backup monitoring challenges like environment complexity and data volume growth will continue to plague data protection professionals, all while they are expected to manage cloud transformations, cybersecurity, and automation initiatives. Unless they find solutions to centrally manage these moving pieces, critical data will be at risk."

The full report is available from the Bocada site.

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