Many IT administrators at small and medium businesses (SMBs) are facing a new budget cycle as the new year dawns. One of the items in which many are considering investing is data protection technology. Most have experienced an explosion in the amount of data requiring protection while not experiencing an equivalent increase in their IT budget. Additionally, the responsibility of complying with new governmental and industry regulations for data retention, archiving and electronic discovery has fallen squarely in the lap of IT staffs, which means they’ll need to stretch their budgets farther.

Data protection used to be an easier proposition. You could simply designate a system as the backup server, install some backup software, attach a tape library and start backing up production servers to it. But, with the advent of critical production applications, server and storage virtualization, critical data stored on desktops and laptops, and increased recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO), data protection has become much more complex.