According to the Veeam® Data Protection Trends Report 2022, the gap between business expectations and IT's ability to deliver has never been wider. Data protection budgets are expected to rise at a faster rate than overall IT spending, according to Veeam Software, the leader in backup, recovery, and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection. As data becomes more critical to business success and the challenges of protecting it grow in complexity, 88% of IT leaders expect data protection budgets to rise at a faster rate than overall IT spending. To protect critical data, more than two-thirds are turning to cloud-based services.
The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 surveyed more than 3,000 IT decision-makers and global enterprises to understand their data protection strategies for the next 12 months and beyond. This study, the largest of its kind, looks at how businesses are preparing for IT challenges, such as the massive growth in cloud services and cloud-native infrastructure, as well as the expanding cyber-attack landscape and the steps they're taking to implement a Modern Data Protection strategy that ensures business continuity.
“Data growth over the past two years [since the pandemic] has more than doubled, in no small part to how we have embraced remote working and cloud-based services and so forth,” said Anand Eswaran, Chief Executive Officer at Veeam. “As data volumes have exploded, so too have the risks associated with data protection; ransomware being a prime example. This research shows that organisations recognise these challenges and are investing heavily, often due to having fallen short in delivering the protection users need. Businesses are losing ground as modernisation of ‘production’ platforms is outpacing their modernisation of ‘protection’ methods and strategies. Data volumes and platform diversity will continue to rise, and the cyber-threat landscape will expand. So, CXOs must invest in a strategy that plugs the gaps they already have and keeps pace with rising data protection demands.”
The data protection gap is widening
Respondents said their data security capabilities can't keep up with the demands of the business, with 89% saying there's a disconnect between how much data they can afford to lose in the event of an outage and how often data is backed up. This has increased by 13% in the last year, demonstrating that as data grows in volume and value, so do the difficulty of adequately securing it. The main reason for this is that firms' data security challenges are vast and diversified.
Cyberattacks have been the single biggest cause of downtime for the second year in a row, with 76% of organisations reporting at least one ransomware event in the past 12 months. Not only is the frequency of these events alarming, so is their potency. Per attack, organisations were unable to recover 36% of their lost data, proving that data protection strategies are currently failing to help businesses prevent, remediate and recover from ransomware attacks.
“As cyberattacks become increasingly sophisticated and even more difficult to prevent, backup and recovery solutions are essential foundations of any organisation’s Modern Data Protection strategy,” said Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam. “For peace of mind, organisations need 100% certainty that backups are being completed within the allocated window and restorations deliver within required SLAs. The best way to ensure data is protected and recoverable in the event of a ransomware attack is to partner with a third-party specialist and invest in an automated and orchestrated solution that protects the myriad data center and cloud-based production platforms that organisations of all sizes rely on today.”
Businesses face a data protection emergency
To close the gap between data protection capabilities and this growing threat landscape, organisations will spend around 6% more annually on data protection than broader IT investments. While this will only go some way to reversing the trend of data protection needs outpacing ability to execute, it is positive to see CXOs acknowledge the urgent need for Modern Data Protection.
As cloud becomes the dominant data platform, 67% of companies are already using cloud services as part of their data security strategy, and 56% are running containers in production or plan to in the next 12 months. During 2022, platform diversity will grow, with the gap between data centres (52%) and cloud servers (48%) closing. This is one of the reasons why the ability to safeguard cloud-hosted workloads is the most significant buying criteria for corporate data protection in 2022, according to 21% of organisations, and IaaS/SaaS capabilities are the defining attribute of Modern Data Protection, according to 39%.
“The power of hybrid IT architectures is driving both production and protection strategies through cloud-storage and Disaster Recovery utilising cloud-hosted infrastructure,” concluded Allan. “The benefits of investing in Modern Data Protection go beyond providing peace of mind, ensuring business continuity and maintaining customer confidence. To balance expenditure against strategic digital initiatives, IT leaders must implement robust solutions at the lowest possible cost.”
Other key findings from the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 include:
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Businesses have an availability gap: 90% of respondents confirmed they have an availability gap between their expected SLAs and how quickly they can return to productivity. This has risen by 10% since 2021.
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Data remains unprotected: Despite backup being a fundamental part of any data protection strategy, 18% of global organisations’ data is not backed up — therefore, completely unprotected.
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Human error is far too common: The most common reason of downtime is technical issues, with 53% of respondents reporting disruptions in infrastructure/networking, server hardware, and software. Administrator configuration errors hampered 46% of respondents, while inadvertent deletion, overwriting of data, or corruption caused by users hampered 49%.
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Protecting remote workers: Only 25% of organisations utilise orchestrated workflows to reconnect resources during a disaster, while 45% run predefined scripts to reconnect resources running remotely in the event of downtime and 29% manually reconfigure user connectivity.
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Economic drivers remain critical: When asked about the most important factors when purchasing an enterprise data solution, 25% of IT leaders are motivated by improving the economics of their solution.
