Though Actifio was “first to the party” in recognizing the issue of Copy Data in the enterprise, the last year has seen numerous parties recognize the issue and draw attention to the need to address the problem. We have seen analysts such as IDC publish research on the scale of the problem ($44 Billion worldwide in 2013, in case you forgot) and we have seen other vendors such as HDS begin to describe their product offerings in the context of fixing the problem.
Last Spring, Gartner defined Copy Data Management as a new technology category and began to refer to the category in some of its research. The last month has seen them begin to include Copy Data Management as a best practice in addressing issues in the enterprise data center. In a recent report titled Align Storage Management With Broader Information Governance Initiatives, Gartner included Copy Data Management as a key aspect of rationalizing operations for data management.
Last month, in their report on Best Practices for Repairing the Broken State of Backup, Gartner highlighted the fact that Copy Data Management is “becoming increasingly important to contain costs and to improve infrastructure agility.” In this statement, Gartner highlighted that effective Copy Data Management goes far beyond better compression and data de-duplication and turns a capability (backup) designed for business resiliency and turns it into one that enables business agility. By virtualizing data and enabling the business to provide instant access to virtual copies of data, a process that started with data protection results in more effective overall data management for a variety of business purposes.
It’s exciting to see analysts like Gartner begin to recommend Copy Data Management as a best practice. With the results our customers are having in both reducing costs AND increasing business agility, we would predict that you’ll see more instances of Copy Data Management being listed as a best practice in a variety of places.
Photo Credit: Philo Nordlund via cc