The good news is that budgets to address the growing security challenges are increasing. That’s according to a global survey of top executives.
The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 reports that 67% of enterprises rely on cloud solutions to protect their data, while the ability to recover from ransomware attacks remains a key driver of business continuity strategies.
This largest study of its kind currently examines how organisations are preparing for the IT challenges they face. In particular, the significant growth in the use of cloud services and cloud-native infrastructure. It also looks at the rising number of cyber attacks and the steps organisations are taking to implement a modern data protection strategy that ensures business continuity.
“Data growth has more than doubled in the last two years. In no small part due to the expansion of remote working or cloud services,” confirms Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam, which conducted the survey. It shows that organisations are aware of the changing IT environment and the dangers it poses and are investing heavily in ensuring protection. “Data volumes and platform diversity will continue to grow and the cyber threat landscape will expand. Therefore, top executives must invest in a strategy that fills the gaps that already exist and keeps pace with the growing demands for data protection,” adds Anand Eswaran.
For the second year in a row, cyberattacks are the leading cause of outages, with 76% of organisations experiencing at least one ransomware incident in the last 12 months. What is alarming is not only the frequency of these incidents, but also their consequences. On average, organisations failed to recover 36% of lost data during a single attack, demonstrating that data protection strategies cannot help businesses prevent ransomware attacks or ensure remediation and recovery.
Respondents admit that their data protection capabilities cannot keep up with the demands of the enterprise, with 89% of respondents noting a gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and how often data is backed up. Over the past 12 months, this gap has increased by 13%, indicating that while the volume and importance of data continues to grow, the challenges of protecting it to a satisfactory level are also increasing. A key factor is that the data protection challenges facing businesses are huge and increasingly diverse.
Emergency situation requires responsible solutions
Organisations will spend approximately 6% more per year on data protection than on general IT investments. While this will only go some way to reversing the situation where data protection needs outstrip execution capabilities, it is positive that top executives are realising the urgency of the need for modern data protection. And it is the cloud that is fulfilling ambitions to become the dominant data platform.
Up to 67% of organisations are already using cloud services as part of their data protection strategy, and 56% are running containers in production environments or plan to do so in the next 12 months. In addition, the survey predicts that the diversity of platforms will expand in 2022, with the ratio between data centres (52%) and cloud servers (48%) shrinking further. This is one reason why 21% of organizations ranked the ability to protect cloud-hosted workloads as the most important factor in purchasing enterprise data protection, and 39% consider IaaS/SaaS capabilities a critical attribute of a modern solution.
“The power of hybrid IT architectures supports both production and protection strategies through cloud storage and disaster recovery using cloud-hosted infrastructure,” confirms Danny Allan, CTO of Veeam. “The benefits of investing in modern data protection go beyond ensuring peace of mind and business continuity, thereby maintaining customer confidence. In order to balance spending with strategic digital initiatives, IT managers need to implement robust solutions at the lowest possible cost,” he explains.
Additional findings from the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022
– Persistent Availability Gap: 90% of respondents confirmed that they have an availability gap, between expected SLAs and how quickly they can return to productivity. This proportion has increased by 10% since 2021.
– Data left unprotected: although backup is an essential part of any data protection strategy, 18% of organisations worldwide do not back up their data, leaving it completely unprotected.
– Human errors are common: Technical failures are the most common cause of outages, with an average of 53% of respondents experiencing outages in infrastructure or network, server hardware or software. 46% of respondents experienced instances of administrator misconfiguration, but 49% experienced accidental deletion, overwriting of data, or user corruption.
– Protecting remote workers: only 25% of organizations use orchestrated workflows to reconnect resources during a disaster, while 45% run predefined scripts to reconnect remotely running resources in the event of an outage, and 29% manually reconfigure user connectivity.
– Economic factors are critically important: When asked about the most important factors when purchasing an enterprise data solution, 25% of IT managers responded that they are motivated by improving the economic aspect of the solution.
Findings from Eastern European countries
– The gap between IT capabilities and business needs has widened: The availability gap was declared by 85% of enterprises and the data protection gap was confirmed by 85% of organisations. Unexpected outages have been experienced by 98 per cent in the last 12 months, leaving an average of 15 per cent of data completely unprotected. 87% of organisations plan to increase their data protection budgets during 2022 and on average plan to spend 6% more than in 2021.
– Cyber threats have created a data protection emergency: 69% of organisations experienced ransomware attacks, making cyber attacks the most common cause of outages for the second year in a row. On average, 32% of organisations failed to recover lost data in each attack, with 68% of organisations failing to recover at least some of their lost data.
– Enterprises cite accidental deletion, overwriting or corruption of data (49%); misconfiguration by administrators (49%); or deliberate disruption by administrators or users (37%) as the main causes of IT outages. Meanwhile, orchestrated workflows for reconnecting resources in the event of an outage are used by only 26 percent of organizations. 52 percent run predefined scripts to reconnect remotely running resources, and 22 percent manually reconfigure user connections.
– Deploying modern data protection is essential: 70% of organisations are already using cloud services as part of their data protection strategy; 55% of organisations are already running containers in production environments and 37% plan to do so in the next 12 months. Half of organizations have data infrastructure hosted in the data center and half host it in the cloud. One-fifth of organizations ranked the ability to protect workloads hosted in the cloud as the most important factor in purchasing an enterprise data protection solution in 2022, and nearly half (43%) of enterprises consider IaaS/SaaS capabilities as a critical attribute of modern data protection. IT managers are motivated to invest in a modern data protection solution to reduce downtime and data loss (25%) and improve the economics of their solution (24%).
The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 explored the experiences of more than 3,000 IT decision makers from global enterprises, their data protection strategy for the next 12 months and beyond into the future. Veeam Software is the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that enable Modern Data Protection™
