Many organisations face data protection challenges: Veeam

• Some 88% of IT leaders expect data protection budgets to rise 
• Three quarter of firms report at least one ransomware last 12 months

The disconnect between business expectations and IT’s ability to deliver has never been more impactful, with some 89% of organisations not protecting data sufficiently, according to the Veeam's Data Protection Trends Report 2022.

In a statement, the backup, recovery and data management solutions provider said 88% of IT leaders expect data protection budgets to rise at a higher rate than broader IT spending as data becomes more critical to business success and the challenges of protecting it grow in complexity. 

Additionally, it said more than two-thirds are turning to cloud-based services to protect essential data.

The report 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 also examined how organisations are preparing for the IT challenges they face, including huge growth in use of cloud services and cloud-native infrastructure.

It also included a survey on expanding cyber-attack landscape and the steps they are taking to implement a modern data protection strategy that ensures business continuity.

Anand Eswaran (pic), chief executive officer at Veeam said data growth over the past two years (since the pandemic) has more than doubled, as a result of remote working and cloud-based services.

“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,” he said

Eswaran also said businesses are losing ground as modernisation of ‘production’ platforms is outpacing their ‘protection’ methods and strategies.

With data volumes and platform diversity continuing to rise, the cyber-threat landscape will expand, therefore, chief experience officers (CXOs) must invest in a strategy that plugs the gaps and keep pace with rising data protection demands, he added.

Widening data protection gap

Respondents in the study stated that their data protection capabilities cannot keep pace with the demands of the business, with 89% reporting a gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage versus how frequently data is backed up. 

This has risen by 13% in the past 12 months, indicating that while data continues to grow in volume and importance, so do the challenges in protecting it to a satisfactory level, the survey indicated. 

The key driver behind this, according to Veeam, is that the data protection challenges facing businesses are immense and increasingly diverse.

For the second year in a row, it said cyberattacks have been the single biggest cause of downtime with 76% of organisations reporting at least one ransomware event in the past 12 months

It added that not only is the frequency of these events alarming, so is their potency. 

Per attack, Veeam said 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 organization’s modern data protection strategy,” said Danny Allan, chief technology officer at Veeam. 

“For peace of mind, organisations need 100% certainty that backups are being completed within the allocated window and restorations delivered within required service-level agreement (SLAs).”

Allan said 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.

He added that organisations should  invest in an automated and orchestrated solution that protects the myriad data center and cloud-based production platforms that organizations of all sizes rely on today.

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,  the survey indicated.

It added that while this will only go some way to reversing the trend of data protection needs outpacing the ability to execute, it is positive to see CXOs acknowledge the urgent need for modern data protection.

As cloud continues its trajectory to becoming the dominant data platform, 67% of organisations already use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy, while 56% now run containers in production or plan to in the next 12 months, the research highlighted.

It said platform diversity will expand during 2022 with the balance between data center (52%) and cloud servers (48%) continuing to close. 

The reported noted that this is one reason 21% of organisations rated the ability to protect cloud-hosted workloads as the most important buying factor for enterprise data protection in 2022 while 39% believe infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service capabilities to be the definitive attribute of modern data protection.

“The power of hybrid IT architectures is driving both production and protection strategies through cloud-storage and disaster recovery utilising cloud-hosted infrastructure,” Allan said. 

​​The full Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 is available for download here.