As fundamental IT practices, backup and recovery have not changed in their importance. It remains critical for enterprises to protect their business-critical corporate data stores. The backup and recovery functions have, however, changed significantly with the advent of virtualization and cloud-based environments. Over the past several years, storage infrastructure has evolved from physical servers to virtualized servers, and has now evolved further to accommodate new platforms like containers and hybrid cloud. This has made the entire process of backup and recovery more complex and multi-nuanced.

The very complexion of infrastructure itself has changed with the advent of virtualization and cloud platforms. The relative ease with which organizations can spin up new virtual servers and individual virtual machines throughout their environment has led to some degree of sprawl in most organizations. Scratch the surface at any large organization, and there will invariably be virtual machines and servers that may be unused or simply forgotten about. This can create an unnecessary drain on resources.