About me

A little about me: My name is Preston de Guise, and I worked primarily in consulting roles from 1996 through to 2014. My customer base covered almost every industry vertical you could think of, with focuses in primary industries (mining, exploration, etc.), through to health, finance, banking, manufacturing, education, and importing.

In 2008 I released Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A corporate insurance policy, based on the lessons I’d learned over the years dealing with a plethora of backup implementations, policies, administrators and managers. I started in Unix system administration, managing multiple backup servers across Australia for a multinational company, so I approach customers with a healthy understanding of the need for availability and prioritisation of issue resolution.

In 2014 I started the process of writing my second book. Originally it was going to be called “Data Recovery”, but it wasn’t long into it that I realised there needed to be some big changes in what I was going to be talking about, and so the project name became “Data Protection”. (Actually, to be fair, my original working title was Icarus Fell, but the publisher didn’t agree.)

In 2015, I joined the pre-sales engineering team for EMC (now Dell EMC) Data Protection Solutions in Melbourne, Australia. I was initially working on mid-market accounts, before moving up to a suite of enterprise accounts.

In 2017, Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability was released. The intro blurb starts with a pretty strong claim, “Backup is dead”, and I stand by that claim. Backup as a standalone topic is no longer relevant given the shifting patterns and rapid data growth we experience. We’re seeing a move away from “backup administrators” and to “data protection administrators”, and the book is very much focused on helping people who want to make that transition get there, and see the entire gamut of protection activities holistically.

In 2019, Protecting Information Assets and IT Infrastructure in the Cloud was released. Co-authored with Ravindra Das, this takes an extensive look at the challenges related to security, risk and data protection when it comes to running workloads in the public Cloud, or using public Cloud to augment on-premises workloads.

Preston

In November 2018 I married my partner of 22 years, Daz. Daz has stood by me on both book writing experiences – a drawn out and at times crazy rollercoaster of frenetic editing and long periods of silence.

Data Protection is still a core focus for me, but I’m expanding my IT and Tech field of view now by poking around ethics in IT. I think this is a wholly unexplored and misunderstood area, and intend to do quite a lot of blogging about it over time. You’ll find my writing over at Fools Rush In.

In my spare time, I write, read, get ruled over by a couple of cats, spend time with Daz, who is now studying at University himself, dabble with photography, potter with programming and pugnaciously procrastinate. There’s probably a bit too much Minecraft mixed in there from time to time, but I remind myself it’s my form of mindfulness.

Oh, and I’m utterly terrified of zombies. As soon as a movie or story has zombies in it, I’m off watching or reading something else. If you know the official phobia name for that, I’d appreciate you letting me know 🙂

As you can expect, this is my own blog, and is not connected to my employment.

16 thoughts on “About”

  1. Hi Preston,

    very good blog! I am also working with networker and would like to share my knowledge. Do you accept guest acticles?

    1. Hi Ronny,

      I had not thought of guest articles when I setup the blog. Let me think about it over the next couple of days and get back to you. I’ll email you directly.

      Cheers,

      Preston.

  2. Hi!

    Really like this blog, I’m pretty new to NetWorker but this blog has helped me alot during my year of NetWorking..
    Thanks!

    1. I’m glad to be able to help where I can, which is why I still contribute to the NetWorker listserv as well as doing this blog. Thanks for the feedback!

  3. Hi Preston,

    I would like to know if you know a way to automatize with a batch file the instalation of agents on both Windows and Linux Environments?

    Thanks for your attention!

    Regards

  4. “Oh, and I’m utterly terrified of zombies. As soon as a movie or story has zombies in it, I’m off watching or reading something else. If you know the official phobia name for that, I’d appreciate you letting me know :-)”

    I have found this, but it is from the Urban Dictionary, so you can use it or not:

    Kinemortophobia: The fear of the undead.

      1. My pleasure!

        I gave it a thumbs-up on my LinkedIn profile too, free ads just because I really like it 🙂

  5. Great blog thanks.
    Really helping out with my first implementation of NW.
    My management are wondering how I picked it up so quick 😉

    On a side note Kinemortophobia is the correct term for your phobia.

    Keep up the great work.

    Will

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