An Interview with Symantec’s Senior VP, Deepak Mohan, on the Future of Data Protection

April 28, 2009

Deepak Mohan is the senior vice president of Symantec’s Information Management Group.

The last five years have demanded a dramatic shift in data protection technologies.  As organizations realize they have increasingly more platforms, applications, servers, virtual machines, and databases to protect than ever before, they have begun to realize that technology from five years ago can no longer address their challenges.

Additionally, as businesses become more global, heterogeneous in nature, and require 24×7 availability - downtime is not tolerated.  Therefore, we have seen a shift from tape to disk as the ‘center of gravity.’  In many ways this shift really parallels the shift among consumers from VCRs to DVD players to DVRs. 

Users will also turn to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and ‘backup in the cloud’ technologies in order to protect data in today’s business environment.  Whatever the approach, data protection will need to stay on IT’s priority list.  Next Generation Data Protection technologies that are complete, powered by disk and centered around recovery will enable users to keep up with the growing demands.

How has the data protection landscape changed over the past five years?

During my 15 years in this industry, I have seen several distinct phases of backup and recovery.  Fifteen years ago, data protection was primarily about …

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