Backup, recovery, and data protection are hard. Really hard. As an architect of backup systems among other tech, I can say that there are rarely simple architectures demanding easy solutions that will satisfy all the difficult problems that so very many companies have created over years of growth. The thing is, so many decisions regarding what platforms on which to place their systems, what applications and their requisite storage requirements to use, often without options, as their environments have grown, and quite often, the final consideration regarding these tools is how to protect the data that’s generated.

For many years, whenever I’ve had any concerns on my architectures, I’ve leaned on the readily available, and masterful assistance of my friend W. Curtis Preston. I truly know of nobody in the space who has anywhere near the practical experience in the category of data protection who knows as much and can speak both logically and clearly on all aspects on which I’ve had any concerns.

Much of what I’ve needed has come from Curtis’ book. Part of the magic of that book was that it had real-world issues, and real-world solutions expressed in clear and relevant language.

When he began working on a new book, and asked me, along with a great group of other technologists to proof, and edit his work, I was honored.

Modern Data Protection, on O’Reilly & Associates, recently released is just the guide we need. The truth is that he’s taken quite a lot of research into the changes that have taken place in the intervening years, most notably the advent of cloud as a relevant platform for target, as well as the SAAS approaches towards scaling, client delivery, and replication. This is only a portion of the vast changes that are being reflected in the backup space. Curtis addresses all these issues, giving a real-world view toward the necessary approaches to issues like high-transaction databases, endpoints, various data-type formats, and many others. I really believe that this is the guide that the industry needs as backup is more than insurance. It’s mission critical to maintaining uptimes and satisfying audit trails.

As I’ve said many times, the ability to leverage the backed-up data for things like running analytics against this data for insight to the data, without affecting the performance of the live datasets. Our corporate data is our currency, and for today’s enterprise, making this data, outside the environment work for us is one of the biggest challenges, outside of satisfying the critical DR or restoration requirements of traditional backup, DR tasks.

I want to extend my personal gratitude to Curtis for this definitive guide, and for the opportunity to help in editing of the book.