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Now is a time of great change when it comes to backup and recovery. For more years than anyone cares to remember IT organizations mostly dependent on traditional tape backup software, even when using disk-based backup systems.

But with the advent of cloud computing things have become a little more complicated. Because of network bandwidth issues many IT organizations are looking for more efficient ways to manage backup in the cloud, ranging from the use of simple protocols such as WebDAV to more proprietary technologies that accelerate the backup and recovery process. And just to make matters more interesting, more holistic approaches to backup and recovery are emerging in the form of offering that allow entire sets of applications to be more easily backed and recovered as a single logical entity.

And just to make matters even more interesting, many organizations are eschewing the backup process altogether in favor of using replication to create a virtual instance of a production environment that can be invoked in a matter of minutes.

The one thing that most IT people are able to agree on is that backup and recovery is probably the first thing they want to do in the cloud; they just can’t necessarily agree what the best way of going about doing that actually is.

In fact, a recent survey of 84 enterprise IT organizations conducted by TechValidate on behalf of Asigra, a provider of backup and recovery software used by cloud service providers, founds that while 66 percent of the respondents are considering cloud backup; 62 percent of them are also considering a new approach to backup/recovery in the next 12-18 months.

The survey also shows that 59 percent of the respondents cited increasing volumes of data to protect as a business driver to modernize backup; and 54 percent of the respondents cited faster recovery times as a reason to modernize their current backup procedures.

According to Tracy Staniland, senior director of corporate marketing for Asigra, the whole move to bring your own device (BYOD) platforms is further exacerbating these concerns because CIOs are not really equipped to protect data on devices that don’t belong to their organization. As a result many of them have begun to look for cloud services that allow end users to back up devices wherever they may be without having to rely on USB drives that can get easily lost or stolen.

At the same time, many of those same IT leaders are not only being asked to back everything up, many of them are also being measured on how quickly they can recover any given set of files. Traditional approaches to backup and recovery generally don’t allow those IT organizations to truly meet their recovery time or point objectives.

As a rule, IT leaders often say that backup and recovery is a priority. But given all the other issues they typically face most of them have paid little attention to backup and recovery. But thanks to the rise of cloud computing, virtualization and any number of new regulations, many of them are starting to ask questions that, given the plethora of choices involved, will almost invariably cause them to seek the advice of their local solution provider expert.