011
Sizing a backup appliance: the five numbers that matter
Front-end capacity, change rate, retention, ingest rate and restore rate. Get these and the configuration follows. Skip one and the appliance is wrong.
Security
Recovery, immutability, identity, exposure.
010
Deduplication ratios are a marketing number until you name the dataset
A 50:1 ratio and a 4:1 ratio can both be honest. The difference is what was measured, and the assumption in your quote determines whether the appliance fits.
009
Nobody sizes for restore
Backup windows get modelled to the hour. The restore rate, which is the number that matters on the day something has gone wrong, is usually nowhere in the document.
008
The backup appliance market: who is winning, and at what
The category split in two. Dedicated backup storage is consolidating around fewer hardware vendors while the growth moved to software platforms that sell cyber resilience.
007
Identity is the blast radius
Every control you have built sits behind a credential. Map which credentials reach which systems and the security architecture usually looks worse than the diagram suggests.
006
Segmentation without buying a microsegmentation product
Most of the value is available from equipment you already own. The hard part was never the enforcement technology, it is knowing what talks to what.
005
Certificate expiry is an availability risk, not a security task
A certificate that expires takes the service down as effectively as a failed disk. It is filed under security, owned by nobody, and tracked in a spreadsheet.
004
Patching infrastructure that cannot reboot
The cadence is set by the reboot, not by the patch. Systems with no maintenance window accumulate risk until something forces the issue.
003
The credentials nobody rotates
Service accounts, API keys, and the shared password in a document from 2019. They do not expire, nobody owns them, and they are what an intruder looks for first.
002
Logging enough to investigate, not enough to bankrupt you
Log everything and the bill becomes the constraint. Log the wrong things and the investigation fails. The selection is the skill.
001
Your immutable backup is not an air gap
Both words get used as though they mean the same protection. They do not, and the difference is the credential that can reach the repository.