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Amazon, Microsoft and Google might grab most of the headlines when it comes to cloud computing but IBM has a century's worth of reinvention behind it.The cloud is growing fast but the vast majority of data which drives the financial performance of big enterprise still resides in corporate data centres. For cloud to penetrate here its going to take some heavy lifting; cue IBM.With the closing of the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition and armed with arguable the most deployed cloud operating system, surely IBM has a new story to tell.In this episode we invite two guests from IBM to tell that story.Enjoy!

For many, disaster recovery planning was a tick box exercise, for others it was life and death. According to Gartner the average company devoted between two and four percent of their IT budget to this requirement and yet it had one of the worst ROI records.This is changing. Cloud computing is blowing away the old syndicated DR business models and is breathing new life into this must have service.Rapid provisioning, push-button automation and orchestration are helping to make Disaster Recovery planning and testing a hot market.Listen to this short episode which has Lucas Wager of IBM asking the questions of Silverstring's CTO, Steve Miller and IBM's, Neil Taylor.Tune in and let your data confidence worries disappear.

Thomas Cowley and Silverstring CTO Steve Miller discuss why we fell in love with cloud for data protection.What benefits does it deliver and what are the pain points that it addresses?

To mis-quote Mark Twain "The reports of the death of tape have been greatly exaggerated."Alistair Mackenzie and Thomas Cowley try to take opposing sides on the seemingly endless discussion about the death of tape as a data protection and storage media.Alistair is pro-tape, or is he?Thomas is anti-tape, or is he?We explore the use cases and examine the place of tape in the world at the end of 2018, whilst trying to avoid an actual fisticuffs situation on the subject.

What were the top five trends we saw in 2018?Alistair Mackenzie and Thomas Cowley discuss the impact of GDPR, the acceleration of the move to the cloud, the further growth of snapshots and data re-use, commoditisation of data protection and the march of the appliances in 2018.We then look forward to 2019, considering how we see further growth of data protection as a service and commoditisation of the market, convergence of data protection into mega-solutions, the rise of AI in this space, realisation of the GDPR threat and the emergence of continuous data protection, or CDP.

One of the more challenging subjects to cover without inducing insomnia in most listeners - software licensing. Many of our customers also find it frustrating to understand the intricacies of different models and how to ensure they're paying the right price, whilst ensuring their business is compliant with the vendor's rules. Alistair Mackenzie joins Thomas Cowley for an initial discussion about IBM Spectrum Protect licensing - a solution that we know has at least 10 different ways of being licensed, as outlined in one of our blogs here: https://www.silverstring.com/blog/10-ways-to-license-spectrum-protect-tsm

As workloads are migrated to the cloud, we've noticed some people aren't taking protection of those workloads as seriously as they might if those workloads were in their own datacenters. Some people maybe think workloads are protected by default. There's a risk that it's easy to get cloud-based lost data back and that cloud providers will have tested recovery for you. In this discussion we examine what data protection is available in the cloud and whether people should be less concerned about their data protection for cloud-based workloads.