By Jen Tisevich

Today, HP announced a new strategy aimed at helping customers change the economics of technology by revisiting how they produce, distribute and consume technology resources.  The state of the economy only adds additional pressure to choose technologies that will reduce costs and deliver proven business outcomes.  One of the actions HP recommends customers adopt is to Standardize, Optimize and Automate for short term gain to enhance efficiency and lower costs.  A key element of this revolves around the protection of a company’s most important asset, its data.  In order to keep pace with massive data growth and changing technology and business demands, businesses must improve the economics of data protection.

How can this be done?

First, it’s important to note that enterprise organizations seem to understand this at some level.  Recent customer research that we just conducted with Forrester Consulting shows that despite the economy, backup and recovery continues to be a major priority for enterprises, and for many their budgets will even increase this year.

To improve the economics of data protection, there are four main things to consider:

(1) Reducing the overall TCO of an end to end backup and recovery solution
(2) Choosing to spend now on the right technologies and solutions so that when a healthy economy returns the business is positioned well to compete and even surpass the competition
(3) Implementing services that improve the time to value of the technology being deployed
(4) Flexibility in purchasing options that ease the financial burden up front

With respect to data protection, there are three important technology areas to focus on now:

1) Server virtualization

In order for businesses to realize the cost savings of their server virtualization infrastructure, they must know that their data is available in this new environment.  While these businesses are experiencing the efficiencies that server virtualization brings to their organization, they’re also finding that it creates new challenges in data protection - 96% of enterprises tell us that server virtualization will have an impact on their backup strategy this year so we know this is a critical priority that must be solved.

Backup and recovery for virtual environments must provide one solution to manage both the physical and virtual environments so users are not burdened with additional tools to learn and implement.  They also need the flexibility to choose the best method or methods to suit their unique virtual environment and ensure that the virtual machine AND its application data are completely protected.

2) Data reduction

With data growth rates averaging between 20 and 60%, businesses of all sizes need to find ways to help reduce the cost of backing up and storing data.  Over 70% of enterprises in our recent research felt that deduplication would be critical to their organization this year and over 80% now believe that virtual full backups are important to data protection.

3) Data security

Reducing the business risk associated with data security has become a key priority to ensure the business is not vulnerable to possible litigation or fines from data not properly secured.  Over 60% of enterprises tell us they will have an increased focus on data security this year.

A key element to HP’s announcement today is a new release of its enterprise backup and recovery software, HP Data Protector.  HP Data Protector offers the lowest cost of any enterprise vendor and addresses all 3 of the key technology issues discussed above.  HP also announced today new services that will expedite the time to value of its backup and recovery software as well as a 0% financing option to help ease the purchasing burden.

Check back for future blogs that will go into more detail on how the new release of HP Data Protector addresses each of the technology challenges discussed.