Backup Admins: the Dentists of IT

This is the second installment of what might be called “Your Grandfather’s IT” if we just replace the commonly used term “legacy” with “Grandfather’s”. Or if we projected into a future where “On-Premise” seems synonymous with “Grandfather’s”

In Grandfather’s IT world the Backup Administrator was the IT equivalent of a dentist. We all knew that daily data protection was important but we were all too busy with day jobs to do it in the wee hours of every morning, or to protect thoroughly and completely. Some spots and dark corners were always missed.   So we only met the Backup Administrator when something went wrong and were about to have a professional tell us about a latest discovered cavity in our protection. 

Even back then the goal was that daily protection should be easy and thorough, and cheap. The drive to cheap led to the same reliance on tape that was developed as a mainframe solution. But in the open systems world there were too many variables so supporting diversity led to more opportunities for failure, more complex software and backup infrastructure, and greater specialization of labor. 

These also led inexorably to higher costs for protections but not to budget increases so more gaps emerged. Which brings us back to the meeting with the backup administrator who always seemed to have the same bad news as that of the dentist: “You have significant data loss. We can’t get that back but with money we can try to restore your smile or fix a hole before next time.”

So how else is the public cloud transforming Grandfather’s IT operations? As with the massive automation opportunities for servers public cloud provides an automation of data protection that should also eliminate the IT position of backup administrator. We are already used to relying upon snapshot technology for some data protection. Within the public cloud the storage is seamlessly equipped with snapshots and it is increasingly easy to manage data protection as a policy rather than as an element of infrastructure operations.  Data protection is becoming a feature within storage rather than as a separate process. 

This will eliminate the need for a Backup Admin to wake up in the morning to brush their teeth as they check to see which backup jobs failed the night before.