Industry analysts say the software's ability to distinguish between high- and low-priority data for backup gives users a potentially powerful tool. "Risk mitigation is very important, but companies shouldn't spend a lot of money backing up data that doesn't need it," says Aberdeen Group Inc. analyst David Hill.
Still, CA continues to lag far behind Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) and Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) when it comes to market share. Cooper, however, insists that CA's traditional focus on the mainframe gives the company an advantage that purely storage-focused companies don't have. "CA is more than just a storage business," he says.
The fact that market leader Veritas recently expanded into managing server resources as well as storage might have some enterprise management software vendors worried, but Cooper asserts CA is ahead in terms of functionality (see Veritas Moves up the Stack). "What they're announcing is kind of a 'me-too' thing," he says. "What they hope to deliver in the next couple of years, we've been delivering for a while."
More than 30 companies have been beta testing BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5, code-named Jaguar, for the past few months, and CA says it has already signed on about eight paying customers.
Two early adopters of BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 -- both already CA customers -- say the new software has greatly simplified managing their backup. Mohamad Alkazaz, the telecom manager at Saint-Gobain Crystals & Detectors, a manufacturer of radiation-detection instruments and photonic components, says he's using the software to simplify restoring data from email and database servers. "Now we're using the agents to back up individual mailboxes," he says, adding that the company has also started backing up database tables separately. "You just restore what you need."
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
