Confessions of a Delinquent Data Protection Blogger

Forgive me fellow bloggers for I am delinquent. It has been several weeks since my last blog.

What's my excuse: vacation, that is, if you can really call it a vacation. I came down with a bad case of poison oak on day 3 of a 10-day whirlwind see-everyone-you-can return trip to New England. Spent the rest of the time itching and driving back and forth between MA and NH to the tune of 1,300 miles. Oh, and did I mention, I stayed with relatives for much of the stay? Enough said.

So, while the "land" portion of my vacation was really anything but relaxing, I was able to find a few hours of peace on the flight to and from Boston. I started reading a great book: "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend picking up a copy. It truly does, as the back of the book jacket says, "[make] you see things in a new way."

It even made me look at data protection differently -- in particular, outsourcing. We all know what happened to the SSPs (storage service providers) a few years back. And backup outsourcing hasn't fared all that much better. Adoption has been slow, to say the least. But if you read "The World Is Flat," you'll see that all fingers point to a world in which outsourcing of all types plays a vital role. It's a byproduct of the "flattening" world in which we live.

While a few companies have had some success with their versions of outsourcing, the vast majority have not. In the data protection world, for example, Asigra, an emerging provider of backup software for remote offices (as well as mobile users and desktops) has watched its sales grow solidly from year to year, thanks to a strong Service Provider business. Arsenal Digital Solutions, a provider of on-line backup and storage management services, is nearing the 1,000th customer mark. And what about Iron Mountain? It lent credibility to the online backup market when it doled out $50M for backup outsourcer LiveVault last December.

Nonetheless, our Research shows that end-users are still hesitant to "hand over" control of their IT environments to third-party outsourcers, though we are seeing increasing interest in software outsourcing. Is it user hesitance that is limiting the growth of this market or is it just another case of bad timing?

My guess is that it's the latter. Not only does the speed at which the world is flattening challenge high-tech companies to keep pace, but it also challenges their customers, our end-users, to "adapt." As Friedman writes (about the high-tech industry in general, not the outsourcing market in particular): "And that is why the great challenge for our time will be to absorb these changes in ways that do not overwhelm people or leave them behind."

In other words, the concept of outsourcing needs to be presented in a way in which the many benefits are made obvious and the "perceived" drawbacks (i.e., the fear of losing control) are minimized. End users didn't get the "SSP" concept four or five years ago, but it looks like they're starting to. In a flattened world, outsourcing may very well be "inevitable" and "unavoidable."