Every other headline I read mentions cloud computing or cloud storage. Analyst firm IDC estimates that global revenue from cloud services could grow from $17.4 billion in 2009 to $44.2 billion in 2013. Since the adoption of cloud infrastructures is starting to have a significant impact on data protection, it is time for me to weigh in on the topic.

Why the Interest in Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing promises to save money, improve service levels, and reduce risk by consolidating and virtualizing IT resources in a single, high efficiency environment. Virtualization frees IT managers from the physical limits of server sizes, bandwidth limitations, storage configuration constraints and processor limits and enables them to allocate resources as they are needed.

Public/external clouds enable medium-sized enterprises to effectively buy a level of IT service that they could not afford to provide themselves. Although the media buzz focuses on external clouds, large enterprises are more often using an internal cloud model to improve utilization of IT resources and control data growth. Essentially, they are creating a centralized, virtualized IT environment where processing, storage, disaster recovery and other IT resources can be dynamically allocated on demand to departments and business units worldwide.

Whether public or private, a successful cloud implementation must have a well-designed cloud storage / data protection environment to be successful.

Minimum requirements for Cloud Storage and Data Protection
Both external cloud providers and large enterprises are looking to protect data in the cloud. There are several minimum technical requirements for a cloud -- public or private to deliver on its promises.

Storage Pools
Given the wide range of data types and data sources in a cloud environment, IT managers need to be able to separate and allocate resources to different pools of data – from data tiering to policy management, to classes of service. They need to be able to separate data into pools each with its own disk type, deduplication configuration, replication priority, backup policies, and/or backup application. All of these pools need to be managed from a single, unified management console.

Multi-tenancy and Charge-back
Public cloud providers and private cloud enterprises need to be able to achieve economies of scale by collocating multiple customers or business units on a single backup device. They need the ability to track usage of resources at the customer or business unit level.

Detailed Reporting and Management
To manage a public or private cloud, IT managers need access to critical data on utilization, trends in capacity and processing usage, and tracking results for system optimization, load balancing and future planning for expansion,

Global Deduplication
To keep cloud storage cost-effective and to gain the benefits of consolidating data storage resources, cloud providers need to be able to leverage a secure multi-tenancy infrastructure and then deduplicate data across nodes and storage for maximum optimization of each customer environment. At the same time, you need to be able to prevent deduplication across storage pools to ensure data is not comingled.

High Performance
Cloud storage providers need to backup, replicate, and restore massive data volumes as quickly as possible so a scalable multinode grid architecture is essential to meeting the on demand service level objectives of the customer

Summary
IT organizations have limited time, resources and money and the future for cloud solutions is compelling for customer investments today. As the requirement to reduce risk and provide the highest levels of availability to critical information assets has become paramount to every organization, data protection has elevated itself as the “Killer App” for the cloud. This is an emerging market with high growth potential and vendors like SEPATON with proven robust enterprise class solutions are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.

As our dependence on data grows, private sector enterprises can learn an important lesson from military and intelligence agencies. That is, to protect data effectively, you need a secure way to destroy it.

The fact is, enterprises are generating record-breaking volumes of data and regulations are requiring them to retain it for longer periods of time. The sheer volume of data to be managed and protected has added significant cost and risk to every phase of the data protection lifecycle - from optimized backup, to replication, to archive, and to final destruction.

While most CIOs acknowledge the importance of adopting faster, more cost-effective ways to backup, deduplicate, and replicate data, few appreciate the importance of efficient, secure data destruction. In many organizations, it still remains a manual process of shredding or demagnetizing physical tapes. After all, how difficult or expensive is it to destroy a physical tape?

That’s where the record-breaking data volumes come in. At the volumes being managed in today’s data center, the cost and risk is exorbitant. For example, there is the administrative time (labor cost) spent keeping track of data to be destroyed. The manual task (more labor cost) of unmounting and cataloging tapes. The risk of human error. The risk of tape loss, theft, or mishandling. This risk is particularly acute while tapes sit around waiting for a shredding service to arrive. Imagine the cost of losing a single tape cartridge with customer account information, medical records, proprietary IP, or email on it.

Let’s not forget the cost of actually destroying and disposing of physical tape media. That plastic takes an environmental toll as well. When the data is destroyed, you need to record their destruction for auditing purposes. That adds more admin labor and potential for human error.

Recognizing a growing need for a better solution, SEPATON announced Secure Erasure™ for our data protection appliances. Now you can retain more of your data online – with 2 TB disk drives and deduplication, you can do afford to keep enormous volumes of data online. With Secure Erasure, you have a simple secure way to destroy virtual cartridges when the data is no longer needed. All that administration time is reduced to a simple push of a button. It automatically provides an email of what cartridge was destroyed – no more manual auditing. No wasted media (disk is reusable) and no plastic cartridges to dispose of – delivering a greener data center.

Enterprise data center managers find themselves at an interesting crossroads. Until a few years ago, their choices for data protection technologies were limited to physical tape and a handful of backup applications. As new technologies were introduced, most enterprises made wholesale changes – committing the entire data center to a single backup application.

Today, however, the choices of backup application, backup protocol, and even backup device vary widely. Most data center managers see value in running multiple backup applications to address different requirements. For example, IT might use a traditional backup application like Symantec NetBackup to protect their physical servers and complement that with Veeam SureBackup to protect their virtual machines. But does this add unnecessary complexity? Reduce overall efficiency? The simple answer is no, as long you have the backup system to handle it.

An open systems approach to data protection gives you the flexibility to run multiple backup applications to meet your specific requirements for backup and retention policies, departmental data protection, and mix of data types.

For example, an open system approach with Symantec OST can be used with half a dozen different OST-compatible disk backup systems (including SEPATON) and many can run alongside other backup applications as needed. In contrast, EMC Boost locks you in to using only Symantec OST and NetWorker. This contrast will become even more important as the other leading backup applications enable OST and Boost-like access. Customers will see value in the new innovations, better pricing, or enhanced services offered by these applications as they deal with their fast-growing data volumes and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.

In her article Ten Data Protection Trends for 2010, Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst, Lauren Whitehouse notes, “Continued focus on improving business processes will trigger the introduction of new business systems, upgraded applications, virtualization, and IT service delivery improvements. The impact on data protection? Change—and lots of it. Organizations will, therefore, have to optimize their data protection infrastructures to support the changing IT landscape as well as contend with unabated growth—all while minimizing the risk of downtime, non-compliance, and security threats.”

Ironically, the real key to success in implementing and managing an infrastructure that can handle a mixed application environment is not in the backup software; but rather, in the backup system. You need a backup appliance that can handle multiple backup applications without adding complexity. You need a system with the flexibility to let you introduce OST or new applications in phases, the management view to manage data protection regardless of backup application or status in its progression from backup to deduplication, to replication as well as archiving and expiration.

The backup appliance also needs to deliver the performance and single-system scalability to protect massive data volumes without requiring multiple systems or added complexity.

In a nutshell, as we look to the future of data protection, data center managers should not be concerned with standardizing on a single backup application but should consider the capabilities of their backup target.