The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023 shows that data backup budgets will continue to grow in line with the growing importance of consistency and reliability for data protection in the hybrid cloud, as well as as organizations continue to fight ransomware.
Veeam ® Software today published the results of the company ‘s fourth annual report on trends in data protection .to better understand how data protection is evolving in the digital world. The survey showed that companies are facing more complex hybrid IT environments and are increasing budgets to fend off cyber attacks, as well as to keep up with the diversification of production environments in different clouds. As a result, IT managers feel that they are not sufficiently protected. Organizations’ top priority this year is to improve the reliability and success of backups, as well as ensuring that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) protection matches the protection they rely on for data center-centric workloads.
Highlights of the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023:
- Modern Data Protection is needed to keep businesses running: Four out of five organizations believe that they have a gap, or a sense of dissatisfaction or anxiety, between what their business units expect and what IT services can deliver. 82% have an ‘Availability Gap’ between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. 79% cite a ‘Protection Gap’ between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data. These gaps are one reason that 57% of organizations expect to change their primary data protection in 2023, as well as the justification for increased data protection budgets.
- Data protection budgets are increasing: Globally, organizations expect to increase their data protection budget in 2023 by 5%, which is notably higher than overall spending plans in other areas of IT. Of the 85% of organizations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3% and often in concert with increased investments in cybersecurity tools.
- Despite the awareness and increase in preparedness, ransomware is winning: Cyberattacks caused the most impactful outages for organizations in 2020, 2021 and 2022, according to the report. 85% of organizations were attacked at least once in the past 12 months; up from 76% in last year’s report. Specifically, recovery is a main concern as organizations reported that only 55% of their encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable from attacks. According to the survey, the single most important aspect that organizations are looking for in a Modern Data Protection solution is the “integration of data protection within a cyber preparedness strategy.”
- Ransomware is the biggest hindrance to Digital Transformation: Due to its burden on budgets and manpower, ransomware and the current volatile cyber security landscape are taking priority for IT teams. This is causing IT resources and budgets originally allocated towards Digital Transformation initiatives to pivot to cyber prevention. Not only do cyberattacks drain operational budgets from ransoms to recovery efforts, but they also reduce organizations’ ability to modernize for their future success; instead, they must pay for prevention and mitigation of the status quo.
- Container-centric workloads are growing in popularity: Containers, and more specifically Kubernetes, show all the characteristics of a mainstream production platform, with the same kinds of data protection strategy disparities as seen in early adopters of SaaS five years ago or virtualization 15 years ago. 52% of respondents are currently running containers, while 40% of organizations are planning to deploy containers – and yet, most organizations are merely protecting the underlying storage, instead of holistically protecting the workloads themselves. This is typical as new production platforms enter mainstream, followed by recognition that legacy methods are insufficient, thereby creating an opportunity for third-party backup tools to ensure comprehensive protection.
Notable insights from the report include:
- Reliability and consistency (of protecting IaaS and SaaS alongside datacenter servers) are the key drivers for improving data protection in 2023. For organizations that are struggling to protect cloud-hosted data with legacy backup solutions, it is likely they will supplement their data center backup solution with IaaS/PaaS and/or SaaS capabilities.
- Ransomware is both the most common and most impactful cause of outages, alongside natural disasters (fire, flood, etc.) and user errors (overwrites, deletion, etc.). Organizations should implement backup and recovery solutions that support a holistic approach to data protection, and that can integrate with other cyber detection and remediation technologies to ensure comprehensive cyber resilience.
- Cloud-based services seem nearly inevitable for organizations of all sizes. But similar to how there isn’t just one type of production cloud, there isn’t just one protection cloud scenario. Organizations should consider cloud tiers for retention, Backup as a Service (BaaS) and ultimately, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
Source: veeam.com