ABSTRACT
Speculation abounds as to what information was lost with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, yet it remains indisputable that a significant amount of knowledge was, indeed, lost. When examined in a silo situation, those who work in data protection preserve information for banks, for airlines, for search engines, for telecommunications companies, for small businesses, and even for individual people, but at a collective level, data protection is the pursuit of information preservation. It used to be that saying data protection to someone meant backup and recovery. Vendors and mega IT companies especially those at the apex of social media are furiously rewriting the definition of a datacenter. Data protection is the mix of proactive and reactive planning, technology, and activities that allow for data continuity. Virtualization is expanding to encompass storage, networks, and almost everything else in the datacenter, and each item in turn raises new considerations for the data protection administrators within a business.
