Hi, my name is Preston de Guise, and I've been specialising in data protection since 1996. Originally a Unix system administrator, I developed a passion early in my career for ensuring the data and systems I was tasked with looking after were well protected. The first enterprise backup platform I used was Solstice Backup, the Sun rebadged version of Legato NetWorker (now Dell EMC NetWorker). As was so often the case with backup systems in the 90s, I joined a system administration team and as the new junior, was tasked with looking after the backups.

For a little while at least, I actually resented looking after backups – that is, until the first time I went on-call. That very first night I had 5 call-outs by the operations team, and every single one involved a data loss situation – and every time the pager went off and I called in, I was able to walk the operators successfully through doing a recovery. Suddenly, everything clicked for me and I realised just how important data protection services are within an organisation. I was hooked.

I'm passionate about data protection in all forms, regardless of whether it's backup and recovery services, lower level protection such as RAID, data services such as snapshots and replication – and even information security and privacy. We live in an information age, and my passion involves making sure that information is never lost.