Solutions are developed to address problems. The bigger people think something is a problem, the more demand there is for a solution. That is why the majority of marketing materials out there are built around educating their target audience about a pain point, and offering a solution. This is how we learned that we need to freshen our mouths with chewing gums, protect computers from malware with antiviruses or backup data to ensure recovery after a server crash. However, no company will talk about problems they don’t have solutions for, and, in the backup world, it means that there may be risks you’re not aware of, and consequently, not protected from.

The enterprise mobility space is a fast-moving market. Probably faster than any other we have seen before in the technology industry. Over the last two to three years it has really heated up: As the Apple iPad was introduced, we’ve had a strong battle between Apple and Android versions, and more recently the introduction of the Microsoft mobility products. The year 2013 will certainly bring even more exciting developments.

2013 is, according to many, the year of software-defined storage.  Let’s discuss what is new and different about it this year.

Like many of you, I regularly read the tech press. And one thing that always interests me is outages. Being a Fellow here at Acronis, I am especially interested in outages that could have either easily been avoided or remediated rapidly. Most people in the tech industry were aware of the recent Amazon outage. But I was much more interested in the 18-minute Google Mail outage that happened two weeks before Christmas. To make a long story short, Google rolled out a routine load balancer update. There are fail safes and monitors, but stuff happens and the sequence was: 0845PT apply the patch, 0906 see the problem, 0913 revert the update, 0916 all back to normal.