Veeam Software has released insights from its fifth annual Veeam Data Protection Trends Report. The survey found that IT leaders are concerned about their ability to recover and restore mission-critical data after attacks and outages. Cyber attacks are the top cause of outages and, while organizations are putting more emphasis on utilizing the cloud for major recoveries, only 32% of organizations believe they can recover from just a small attack, crisis or outage within a week.
While most organizations consider that cyber resilience is a foundational aspect of their broader business continuity or disaster recovery strategy, BC/DR preparedness is not yet ‘passing’ most SLA expectations. When asked about their latest large scale cyber/disaster test, less than three out of five (58%) servers were recoverable within expectations.
Other key findings from the report include:
Ransomware continues to be a ‘when’ not an ‘if’: 76% of organizations were attacked at least once in the past 12 months. While this number is down from 85% in the previous report, 26% reported being attacked at least four times in 2023. Recovery is still a major concern, as only 13% said they can successfully orchestrate recovery during a disaster recovery situation.
Digital transformation is being hampered by cyber attacks: the survey ranked protecting against cyber threats and addressing environmental, social, and governmental goals as the biggest inhibitors to IT modernization and digital transformation initiatives. These factors scored higher than the usual struggles related to skills, economic concerns, and organizational issues, due to the amount of effort and resources that were being diverted from digital transformation or IT modernization investments.
Data protection budget increases are accelerating: data protection budgets are expected to grow by 6.6% in 2024. This is the second straight year that the survey revealed that data protection spending growth will outpace IT spending growth. Overall, 92% of organizations expect to spend more on data protection in 2024 to continue to prepare against cyber attacks as well as the changing production landscape that requires different approaches to data protection.
Data protection and IT security are becoming more integrated: for the second straight year, survey respondents consider the most common and most important aspect of a modern data protection solution is one that integrates with cyber security tools. Two out of five (41%) consider some aspect of mobility in cloud scenarios as most important characteristic of a modern solution, including the ability to move a workload from one cloud to another and the standardization of protection between on-premises workloads and IaaS/SaaS.
Most organizations are using containers but not backing them all up: container usage continues to rise, with 59% of enterprises running them in production, and another 37% either rolling them out or planning to. Unfortunately, only 25% of organizations use a backup solution that is purpose-built for containers, while the rest of organizations backup only some of the underlying components – e.g., storage repositories or the database contents. Neither tactic ensures that the applications and services will be resumable after a crisis, or even a simple import/configuration error that needs to be undone.
Hybrid production architectures are forcing reconsideration of ‘backup’: for the second straight year, the two most important considerations for enterprise backup solutions are reliability and the protection of cloud-hosted workloads (IaaS and SaaS). This is problematic for organizations relying on older data center-centric data protection solutions. As organizations move workloads from one platform or cloud to another, IT teams relying on legacy backup solutions that do not offer equitable protection of cloud-hosted workloads will struggle to maintain SLAs, particularly those that embrace cloud-native offerings like Microsoft 365/Salesforce (SaaS) or containers.
About the report
Veeam commissioned the survey in late 2023 through an independent research firm. The report surveyed 1,200 unbiased IT leaders and implementors from all over the world and all sizes of organizations on a variety of data protection drivers, challenges, and strategies.
