Veeam Software has published findings from the company’s fourth annual Data Protection Trends Report. This survey-based report found that 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 percent have an ‘availability gap’ between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. 79 percent 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 percent of organizations expect to change their primary data protection in 2023.
Other key findings from the Data Protection Trends Report 2023 include:
- Companies are challenged with more complex hybrid IT environments and are raising budgets to fend off cyber attacks as well as to keep up as production environments continue to diversify across various clouds. The result is that IT leaders feel they aren’t sufficiently protected.
- A top priority of organizations this year is improving reliability and success of backups, followed by ensuring that infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) protection is equitable to the protection they rely on for data center-centric workloads.
- Data protection budgets are increasing: globally, organizations expect to increase their data protection budget in 2023 by 6.5 percent, which is notably higher than overall spending plans in other areas of IT. Of the 85 percent of organizations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3 percent and often in concert with increased investments in cyber security tools.
- Cyber attacks caused the most impactful outages for organizations in 2020, 2021 and 2022, according to the report. 85 percent 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 percent 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 cyber attacks 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 percent of respondents are currently running containers, while 40 percent 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.
- Reliability and consistency (of protecting IaaS and SaaS alongside data center 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.
