About

About me

A little about me: My name is Preston de Guise, and I worked primarily in consulting roles from 1996 through to 2014 – and within the vendor space from 2015 to 2026. 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 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.

In 2020, Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability (2nd Edition) was released. This is a huge update to the original book – more than doubling the content and detail as I explore concepts, processes and technology in much greater detail: “The second edition of Data Protection goes beyond the traditional topics including deduplication, continuous availability, snapshots, replication, backup, and recovery, and explores such additional considerations as legal, privacy, and ethical issues. A new model is presented for understanding and planning the various aspects of data protection, which is essential to developing holistic strategies. The second edition also addresses the cloud and the growing adoption of software and function as a service, as well as effectively planning over the lifespan of a workload: what the best mix of traditional and cloud native data protection services might be. Virtualization continues to present new challenges to data protection, and the impact of containerization is examined.”

In 2023, The Busy IT Manager’s Guide to Data Recovery was released. This is a concise book entirely focused on what people who are accountable for data protection need to be aware of in their duties. “No IT manager or worker enjoys being woken up the middle of the night over a system fault. But arguably the worst way to be awakened is over a situation where data loss has occurred – and the recovery is going wrong.”

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