Enterprise Strategy Group recently published a brief entitled “The Cloud’s Connection to Copy Data Management” (CDM). Interestingly, they coined a new term called data management and enablement (DM&E) which is analogous to CDM. Here are some thoughts on the paper:
A key finding of the paper is that 71% of the respondents stated that they had some form of CDM/DM&E in place. This usage seems unrealistically high, but I think that it is a reflection of market confusion. The term CDM has been co-opted by disk array and backup vendors, and it has reached the point where any product that captures data trumpets their support for CDM/DM&E. The reality is that these “CDM/DM&E” solutions are extremely limited at best due to the fact that these products are largely based on legacy architectures that are not cloud optimized, but unfortunately, it appears that the respondents did not understand this important differentiation.
Another datapoint of interest is Cloud adoption: 26% of respondents said that the cloud is the most compelling capability for CDM/DM&E. This makes sense as companies are looking to leverage the flexibility and scalability of the cloud in new ways. It is ironic because the cloud use case is not one that is embraced by traditional solutions like disk arrays and backup software which most customers seem to rely upon for their CDM/DM&E strategy.
The paper is well worth a read.