Whats New In Backup And Recovery For 2024?

Introduction

Data backup and recovery continues to evolve as new technologies emerge and data storage needs grow. As we look ahead to 2024, several key trends are shaping the future of backup and recovery. In this article, I will provide an overview of the most important developments to expect in backup and recovery over the next few years.

Cloud Backup Becomes The Norm

Cloud-based backup is quickly becoming the predominant method for protecting data. The advantages of cloud backup include lower costs, greater scalability, and reduced management overhead. By 2024, cloud backup services will completely dominate the market.

Key drivers of this shift include:

• Lower costs – Cloud backup services leverage economies of scale to offer lower pricing compared to on-premises solutions. As cloud storage costs continue to decline, cloud backup becomes even more affordable.

• Scalability – Cloud-based backup offers unlimited capacity and flexibility to scale up as data storage needs grow. This avoids the capacity limitations and overhead of on-premises backup infrastructure.

• Automation – Cloud backup services provide automated backup scheduling, retention policies, and other management tasks. This reduces the administration burden compared to on-premises backup software and hardware.

• Accessibility – Cloud backup data can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. This enables faster disaster recovery compared to restoring from local backup copies.

Backup As A Service Proliferates

Backup as a service (BaaS) solutions will continue to gain popularity through 2024. With BaaS, the service provider owns, operates and manages the backup environment. This gives organizations an affordable option to offload backup management.

The major reasons businesses are adopting BaaS include:

• Cost savings from not having to purchase and maintain backup software and hardware.

• Simplified operations since the BaaS provider handles day-to-day backup administration.

• Flexibility to back up a wide range of endpoints including SaaS apps, mobile devices and remote offices.

• Reliability through proven architectures and redundancy offered by BaaS providers.

I expect BaaS adoption to grow steadily, especially among small and midsize businesses lacking dedicated backup administrators.

Snapshot-Based Backups Gain Prominence

Traditional backup solutions capture periodic full backups along with incremental backups capturing changes since the last full backup. Snapshot-based backup takes a different approach by freezing application data and storage volumes at a point-in-time to create incremental snapshots.

Here are some key advantages of snapshot backups:

• Snapshots take less time to capture compared to traditional backups. Faster backups mean reduced impact on production environments.

• They enable granular, frequent restore points for enhanced recovery flexibility.

• They integrate well with applications for application-consistent backups.

• Storage efficiency through pointer-based snapshots and data deduplication.

By 2024, leading backup products will use snapshot technology extensively. Expect snapshot integration with hypervisors, SaaS platforms, and storage arrays for simplified data protection.

Intelligent Analytics For Backup Data

Backup platforms are becoming smarter through integrated analytics capabilities. Analytics provide insight into backup operations and data with features like:

• Risk assessment – Analyze backup infrastructure health, data change rates, policy gaps, and other risks.

• Anomaly detection – Identify unusual backup patterns and potential problems requiring intervention.

• Capacity forecasting – Predict future capacity needs based on growth trends.

• Compliance reporting – Track backups of regulated data to demonstrate compliance.

• Storage optimization – Determine which backup data to move to lower-cost storage based on access patterns.

These analytics generate actionable intelligence to improve backups, support recoveries, and guide data protection strategy. Look for machine learning to enhance analytics in identifying anomalies and predicting capacity.

Faster Restore Methods

Backup speed is improving, but restore speed remains a challenge. New restore technologies target this problem:

• Incremental Forever – Restore the most recent version first, then incrementally apply changes backwards to accelerate restores.

• Synthetic Fulls – Assemble recent backup copies into a synthetic full backup for faster recovery.

• Flat Backups – Maintain a full backup of all data to enable restore from a single copy.

• Cloud-Scale Incrementals – Use a cloud service to identify changed blocks between incremental backups for rapid recovery.

These approaches will allow much faster restores, reducing downtime and meeting tighter RTOs. Backup vendors will continue innovating to bring down recovery times.

Greater SaaS Data Protection

Backing up Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Workday becomes more important as usage grows. However, most SaaS platforms lack native backup capabilities. Independent software vendors are filling the gap with specialized SaaS backup products.

Key capabilities in SaaS backup solutions include:

• Granular, item-level restore for SaaS data and metadata.

• Platform-specific support, like SharePoint item versioning in Microsoft 365.

• Automated, policy-based backup scheduling.

• Backup data storage options including local copies and cloud repositories.

• Integrated compliance features for data governance.

By 2024, robust SaaS data protection will be a must-have for all organizations. Expect continuing innovation in SaaS backup as adoption accelerates.

Conclusion

Backup and recovery continues to evolve rapidly to meet growing business demands. The trends highlighted here represent the major innovations I expect to see over the next few years. Cloud delivery, intelligent analytics, faster restores, and broad platform support represent the future of data protection. Organizations that embrace these new technologies will gain a competitive advantage through reduced risk and improved data availability.