Buying a car can be challenging. As a buyer, there are certain things you look for and see value in. And those things differ 
according to your needs. For instance, my ideal car is an SUV with four wheel drive, has a voice-activated GPS system, and is backed by a trusted car brand. From this list of must-haves you can infer my needs; I need a vehicle that is built to withstand New England winters, provides navigation assistance, and is historically known to be reliable. I look for certain features based on my transportation needs. It’s important to note that your list of car requirements is likely different from mine. You may live in a warmer climate where it rarely snows, and therefore prefer an eco-friendly, compact car. Or you may be a NASCAR driver and require a vehicle with a manual transmission and a five-point harness, rather than a traditional seatbelt. I can confidently say your ideal vehicle looks slightly, if not completely, different from mine. Our individual buyer personas are based on each of our distinctive needs.
The same goes for many other aspects of life, as well as business, including the way in which we buy and consume data protection solutions. Each data owner has a distinct set of requirements they need to meet in order to successfully do their job. For instance, the backup admin, database admin and vAdmin each play an important role in the business’ overall data protection strategy. Each individual may be partially, or even solely, responsible for protecting their data and therefore have specific requirements for visibility and control for that protection. And for efficiency and familiarity purposes, each data owner is best empowered through using their native tools and interfaces. The 2016 EMC Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) confirms these points, indicating that management of data protection aligns with environment, meaning that the storage team focuses on storage based protection, the virtualization team on virtual environments, and so forth. And 40% of those surveyed also noted that they prefer a collaborative model, giving both IT and app owners self-service in terms of visibility and management capabilities. Although each individual is working towards the common goal of fully protected and accessible data, the way in which they manage the data protection environment is different. Each situation is unique and every role has unique needs.
In addition, as enterprises engage in implementing more modern approaches to data protection, new requirements will emerge which introduce new buyers. For instance, while self-service in the data center has brought to bear many benefits, it has also contributed largely to copy data sprawl. The proliferation of copy data leads to increased cost and risk, detracting from an enterprise’s ability to invest in next generation apps and infrastructure. The buyer concerned with controlling copy data is probably the person held accountable for setting SLAs for both protection and storage. They may be an infrastructure or compliance manager and their requirements differ from those of an application, backup, or storage admin, because they have a unique set of needs.
Each of these buyers, both old and new, work in different ways. Each has a unique view of the idea of ‘self-service,’ due to the distinctive requirements of their jobs. In addition, in order to ensure simplified administration, as well as individualized visibility and control, data owners must be empowered to work using their native tools. Gartner states in their recent Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software1 that “70% of businesses and application owners will have more self-service control over their data protection services” by 2018. The data protection providers that will be the most successful are those who understand your needs as you balance today’s requirements, and help you begin your transformation to the modern data center of tomorrow. More modern approaches to data protection and data management dictate new models, processes and requirements for data owners to uphold in order to successfully do their job.
This trend in data protection has long been anticipated, having brought to market industry-leading solutions built to meet the specific needs of data owners for the most popular use cases as they have evolved. The introduction of DD Boost for Enterprise Applications in 2014 enabled application owners and DBAs to control backup and recovery using their native tools. Since the product’s release, we’ve continued to build solutions purposefully designed for specific roles and use cases. With the Dell Data Protection Suite Family, we enable customers with purpose-built data protection software offerings tailored for backup and recovery, VMware protection, mission critical application protection, and archive as well as an all-purpose Enterprise Edition, which addresses all of these concerns. Whether you are a backup admin, database admin, or vAdmin, we provide the visibility and control you need to meet your requirements for protecting your mission critical data. And, we continue executing against our use case-based, self-service strategy with Enterprise Copy Data Management, introduced in May 2016 and focused on providing global copy data oversight and management without compromising self-service workflows.
As more and more customers make their journey to the third platform, we will continue evolving along with your needs, thus helping you to transform to the modern data center. With Dell, you can rest assured that no matter who you are, no matter what your needs are, we are bringing you data protection everywhere that you can trust.
12016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software