Jason Buffington .com

Perhaps one of the least-expected IT revolutions is the decentralization of data among endpoint devices. After decades of IT delivering consolidated infrastructure platforms (servers), data is becoming increasingly distributed as end users demand increasing flexibility in the devices that they use in their workplace. “Endpoint” should not be confused with “BYOD,” as today’s endpoint devices…

It is impossible to have an IT modernization discussion that doesn’t include the cloud, but the details beyond that will vary greatly: Some will replace their legacy backup product with a backup service. Some should supplement their current backup product with cloud storage. Some ought to add a cloud-based DR capability to their on-premises backup…

While mobile and cloud platforms are relatively new, data centers have been under the watchful eye of IT professionals for decades; so why is backup not solved yet? There are at least two primary reasons that even data center data protection continues to challenge IT: Changes in workload recovery requirements and workload protection mechanisms. The…

Each year, Enterprise Strategy Group publishes its annual IT Spending Intentions Survey, and for the past three years, “improving data backup and recovery” and “increased use of server virtualization” have been among the top three stated IT priorities. While their positions bounce around within the top echelon, they are always adjacent in the overall and…

Disaster recovery as a service, or cloud-based disaster recovery (DR), makes testing a DR plan too easy to overlook — the opposite of traditional self-managed BC/DR facilities. One of the primary deterrents to most business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans is that recurring testing must occur to ensure preparedness for when calamity strikes as well as…

We’re well past the notion that backup and archive aren’t the same thing, explains columnist Jason Buffington, but they may still leverage the same technologies. We’re in what I believe is the third-wave of understanding the relationships between backups and archives. In a blog post I wrote last year, I suggested data protection as the appropriate…