Today’s countless mobile devices present tangible opportunities to drive measurable and substantial value for the enterprise. Field service workers, executives on the go, sales reps, and project managers all have a need for mobile access to email, applications, enterprise data and files. There’s no question that the advent of the iPad, iPhone and other mobile devices brings substantial benefits to the enterprise. However, these benefits also come with new security risks that enterprise IT departments must be ever vigilant about, lest critical data be compromised.

Many would agree that two copies are better than one. But redundancy has its cost, too. And then you have management overheads for two backup destinations and uncertainty of your recovery success rate with tape, disk or cloud. Sounds like a puzzle to solve. The key to efficient backup strategy with guaranteed outcome is to clearly define which goal you meet with each type of backup, and combine the two in the right way. Hybrid is not just about two copies, software vendors or service providers. It’s about making a smart – and budget-friendly – decision about your entire backup and recovery plan.

Usually, I do not write about technology. I much prefer to speak about the application of technology to solve problems. But, let me start April by telling a story about an amazing technological innovation here at Acronis.Our chief engineer, Sam Stolichnaya, was working hard at improving our deduplication technology. For years, he had been working on a recursive compression technology where you could compress files, and then compress that, and again and again until you had a result thousands of times smaller than the original. While this worked very well, it used up a lot of memory, so it was not a good general solution. Dedupe could be.Acronis already supplies a dedupe module that seamlessly installs into our platform and saves storage by finding duplicate information and only storing it once. Anyway, Sam and another engineer, Peter Pshenichnaya, were discussing the size of the data block. Should we dedupe by file or by disk block, for example?  All of a sudden, Sam sees the light bulb over his head start blinking and he realizes that since all data is either a zero or a one, we can dedupe everything to a 0,1. In fact, we will not even need to store the result since almost everyone could remember 0,1.M. Dupont, our president of sales, explains the value of this as astronomical in nature. And the 0,1 result is not dependent on the amount or type of data being stored. With Sam and Peter’s solution, there is a complete independence from data type or amount. We hope to see the sale of dedupe look like a hockey stick graph. He explains: “This is just one of those great ideas that is so obvious when you hear it explained, you cannot believe no one had thought of it before.” It is in a class with the invention of the button or the hammer or the candle.Acronis is quickly bringing this technology to market. In fact, all of you can already back up your data, as long as you can remember the numbers 0 and 1. All of your data is zeros and ones, and there it dedupes to 0,1. Unfortunately, we have a slight delay in the release of the recovery portion of this software, but it should ship sometime this year. So you can start backing up now, and as long as you have no disasters or mistakes for a while, you can be sure you data is safe.

Virtualization: It comes with enormous opportunities for organizations of all sizes. On the other hand, it serves up a number of intense challenges. Among these challenges is the increased risk of data loss and massive outage.