In our ongoing quest to determine how our readers use cloud technologies, our second poll is now available: Which Type of Data Protection Service(s) Do You Use? This poll’s goal is to determine how data protection fits into your organization’s use of the cloud, if it does at all. There are many cloud-based tools for data protection, as well as many integrations between data protection vendors and cloud service providers. We’d like to know if these tools are being used, and if they are, which ones.

Cloud adoption for data protection seems to be on the rise. This poll will help us determine exactly how you’re using the cloud for data protection. Instead of asking which products you’re using, we’ve broken those products into classes of services:

  • Local 3rd Party are those products that provide local data protection that are not provided by your hypervisor vendor (Veeam, Zerto, NAKIVO, Symantec, etc.)
  • Local Vendor Provided are those products provided by your hypervisor vendor (VMware VDP, Microsoft DPM, etc.)
  • Secondary Physical Data Center via Replication is a traditional hot site.
  • Secondary Cold Cloud uses a cloud for storage of replicated or backed-up data with no means to run the workloads within the cloud (CloudVelox, Quantum, etc.)
  • Secondary Hot Cloud uses a cloud not only for storage of replicated or backed-up data, but it has the means to run the workloads within the cloud (VMware vCloud Air, HotLink, Veeam, Datto, etc.)
  • Traditional Agent Based backup or replication tells us the technology you use to perform your replication and/or backup.
  • Backup to Tape will let us know if you are also backing up your data to tape or some other media such as Blu-ray.
  • No Data Protection lets us know you do not protect your data yourself but may rely on your cloud service provider to do everything.
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We plan to take this data and determine how data protection is done around the world. We will rerun the poll in about six months so that we can spot changes and trends as new services become available. A question we’re holding for later is whether these solutions are one-offs for moving to the cloud, after which the cloud is depended on for data protection. That may be a poll for later; perhaps we can find the answer within the poll itself or via conversation on social media.
Data protection has moved from just backups to replication and protection of data as it moves to and from clouds. Has the community moved to these newer products?
Please help us find answers to the question “How Do You Data Protect?,” so we can share them with the community for use within your own architectures and designs.