Veeam’s 2022 Data Protection Trends report says that users now operate in a hybrid multi-cloud world, face rabid ransomware attacks, and need more data protected – and to have that data recovered more quickly, increasingly by SaaS processes and from the cloud.
The two main strands this report brings out for us are that, first, data protection is becoming a combination of backup and security, and second, the public cloud enables more economic and flexible protection.
The findings are the result of a research firm surveying more than 3,000 IT decision makers and IT professionals about their data protection drivers and strategies heading into 2022. The report has a large and worldwide enterprise bias as most respondents were from 1,000-plus employee organisations across 28 different countries.
There were three highlights picked out by Veeam, the first being that respondents ran their IT in a hybrid and multi-cloud (hyperscale and MSP) environment.
We can see from Veeam’s chart above that the relative percentage of on-premises physical servers, virtual machines, and hosted virtual machines is stabilising with an approximate 50:50 split between on-premises and hosted systems.
The researchers asked respondents if they thought their data protection SLAs were good enough and if enough data was being protected at the right frequency. Virtually all respondents believed there was an “availability gap” between the SLAs expected and how quickly IT can return to productivity, and also a “protection gap” between how much data they can afford to lose and how often data is protected.
The third highlighted item is that the difference between high-priority data and the rest is narrowing:
Just over half the respondents suffered a ransomware-caused outage, with cyberattacks causing the most outages, and only 36 per cent of data was recoverable after a ransomware attack.
We thought the finding that “4 of 5 organizations do expect to use either cloud-storage or a managed backup service – i.e. Backup as a Service (BaaS) – within the next two years” was interesting, as was the rise of cloud-based disaster recovery.
The underlying messages here are that enterprises need more data protection and know it, and that SaaS approaches and the public cloud will play a greater role. The 28-page report is an interesting read for everyone and not just a piece of sales collateral for Veeam products. Prepare your data protection defences. Assume they will be breached and prepare and rehearse your cyberattack recovery processes so you can get up and running quickly after an attack.
