“Cloud and virtualisation dominated conversations in 2011; the adoption of virtualisation increased and so did concern about information security,” said Mr Vijay Mhaskar, Vice-President (Information Management Group) at Symantec Corporation, while taking a look at trends through the past year.

He pointed out that information was emerging as an area of increased focus with enterprises trying to secure and manage it (information).

Sharing Symantec's predictions for 2012, particularly in the storage and backup areas within the IT enterprise, Mr Mhaskar said “information governance will become a positive buzzword. Companies that fail to control and protect their data will fall victim to dataleaks/ data loss. Their lack of information governance would prevent adoption of new technologies and they would end up spending huge sums on compliance and eDiscovery. Vendors would, therefore, look at bringing together archiving, eDiscovery, encryption, back-up, data loss prevention and other security technologies to help organisations have better control over their information.

“And private cloud will not become a cloud in a box,” he continued.

He said “you can't purchase hardware and expect it to suddenly have a cloud computing environment. Data centre managers who implemented cloud technologies and virtualisation, did so to simplify. Yet, at the core of this huge transition to the cloud, are business advantages including scalability, agility, control and measurability.”

Virtual tech

Symantec also foresees the increased interdependence of physical and virtual technologies in 2012. “Virtualisation projects often start small and eventually grow into large portions of the IT environment. IT professionals get so consumed with the buzz surrounding virtualisation that they forget that it (virtualisation) still runs on physical hardware.

“And the new hardware needed for the new projects mean more capital costs upfront and less utilisation due to more server/ storage islands. This results in a drop on return on investments as the operational cost of running separate environments slackens the ability of the organisation to convert from physical to virtual. The answer to managing this complexity is standardisation across platforms,” he explained.

Symantec expects the backup market to grow fast even as Mother Nature tests organisations' disaster recovery plans.

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