Will you ride the tide of data, or drown in protection gaps?

While there is immediate and increasing interest in evolving infrastructure to support distributed, scale-out databases and cloud databases, a lack of robust backup and recovery technologies is hindering adoption, according to a new survey released by Datos IO and conducted in partnership with Dimensional Research.

The survey examined the increasing demand for distributed applications and scale-out databases, including MongoDB and Cassandra (Apache and DataStax), and investigated IT leaders' concerns and benefits.

According to Datos IO, to remain competitive in today's digital economy, enterprises must meet ever-increasing data demands by building, running and managing modern cloud applications, including customer and security analytics, real-time supply chain management, Internet of Things (IoT) and digital content and advertising. Such applications require scalable and available databases deployed on premise or in the cloud for adequate agility, speed and scale.

The survey found that more than 75% of respondents predict next-generation databases will influence organisational growth in the coming 24 months.

As a result of this, more than 80% of enterprise IT and database professionals believe deployment of next-generation databases will grow by more than double by 2018.

The majority of apps (54%) deployed on next-generation databases are analytics related, with business management, IoT and security apps close behind. MongoDB and Cassandra lead distributed database deployment, followed by cloud-native databases from Microsoft and Amazon, the survey finds.

Nearly all (89%) of enterprise IT database professionals declared that backup and recovery (as a function of storage) is critical for production applications. Furthermore, 61% of enterprise IT and database professionals cite poor backup and recovery solutions available today as preventing adoption of next-generation database technology.

"This survey shows IT application and database professionals clearly understand that for organisations to ride this unprecedented tide of data agility, they also need to innovate data storage, specifically for distributed backup and recovery," says Tarun Thakur, Datos IO co-founder and CEO.

"To deploy and scale next-generation applications, enterprises must be sure that data can be managed and recovered over its lifecycle at scale. To ultimately unlock the full potential of data, it is imperative that businesses fill today's data protection gaps," Thakur says.