Now honestly, this episode has not gone out today sponsored by British Airways, or in any way taking advantage of the situation that affected 1000’s of BA customers over the weekend, the timing is purely coincidental.

However, those incidents have made this episode quite timely as they again highlight just how crucial to our day to day activities as individuals and businesses technology is.

As technology continues to be integral to pretty much anything we do, the recent events at BA and the disruption caused by WannaCrypt are all examples of what happens when our technology is unavailable, huge disruption, reputational damage, financial impacts, as well as the stress it brings to the lives of both those trying to deal with the outage and those on the end of it.

Last week I spoke with Veeam’s Rick Vanover (Remaining relevant in a changing world – Rick Vanover – Ep28) about how they where working to change the focus of their customers from backup and recovery to availability, ensuring that systems and applications where protected and available, not just the data they contained.

As part of my time at the recent VeeamON event, I also took the opportunity to chat with the wider IT community who attended, not just those charged with delivering availability and data protection, but also those who looked at the industry through a broader lens, trying to understand not just how vendors viewed availability, but also at the general data market trends and whether businesses and end users where shifting their attitudes in reaction to those trends.

So over the next couple of weeks, I’ve put together a collection of those chats to give you a wider view of the availability market, how analysts see it and how building a stack of technologies can play a big part in ensuring that your data is available, secure and compliant.

First up, I speak with Justin Warren and Jeff Leeds.

Justin, is a well-known industry analyst and consultant as well as the host of the fantastic Eigencast podcast (if you don’t already listen you should try it out) Justin is often outspoken, but always provides a fascinating insight into the wider industry, and shares some thoughts here, on how the industry is maturing, how vendors and technology is changing and how organisations are changing or perhaps not changing to meet new availability needs.

You can follow Justin on twitter @jpwarren and do check out the fantastic Eigencast podcast.

Jeff Leeds, was part of a big NetApp presence at the event and I was intrigued why a storage vendor, famed for their own robust suite of data protection and availability technologies, should be such a supporter of a potential “competitor”.

However, Jeff shared how partnerships and complimentary technologies are critical in building an appropriate data strategy, helping us all ensure our businesses remain on.

You can follow Jeff on twitter at @HMBcentral and find out more about NetApp’s own solutions over at www.netapp.com

I hope you enjoyed the slightly different format and next week we’ll dig more into this subject as I speak with Andrew Smith from IDC and technology vendors Pivot3 and Data Gravity.

To catch it, please subscribe in all the normal homes of Podcasts, thanks for listening.

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