The coronavirus pandemic impacted virtually every aspect of business – including acceleration of cloud data protection. Veeam’s Data Protection Report 2021, the largest survey of its kind with more than 3,000 business leaders around the world, found that 96 percent of organizations already started accelerating cloud usage, and more than 50 percent accelerated their digital transformation plans.
More data stored in the cloud, driven in part by remote work and other changes due to the pandemic, means more data to backup and secure. Additionally, more businesses have vaulted “business continuity” and “meeting customer expectations” to the top of their priority lists.
After the stops and starts early in the pandemic, increased shielding from downtime and data loss, while still ensuring accessibility, is an essential part of cloud data protection strategy.
Continued Changes Impacting Data Protection and Challenges That Lie Ahead
While the pandemic had dramatic immediate effects on business, the real significance is how businesses are changing their planned approach in the coming years.
Veeam asked how enterprises adapted their IT environments in 2020, but the survey also asked what their plans are for the future. Key findings include:
- 60 percent of organizations will add more cloud services to their IT delivery strategy
- 54 percent will accelerate hybrid IT, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) / cloud hosted infrastructure
- 48 percent will accelerate their use of Software as a Service (SaaS)
Notably, only 4 percent of businesses surveyed anticipate no significant changes to IT. Adapting to modern solutions is a priority for nearly all the businesses surveyed.
Anticipated Challenges
The way pandemic has changed business, particularly the focus on enabling all tasks for remote work, has brought to light a whole new set of challenges.
The Veeam survey collated the expectations of businesses regarding the gap between how fast you can recover vs. how fast you need to recover. The responses highlighted a large discrepancy:
- 80 percent say they have an “availability gap.”
- 76 percent say they have a “protection gap” between how frequently they backup vs. what they can afford to lose.
The picture is clear: the solutions in place today aren’t sufficient to protect data, improve recovery time objectives, and be adequately cost-efficient. Legacy backups are not meeting current needs, but cloud data protection can help.
The Case for Backup-as-a-Service
In 2020, when they could least afford it, 37 percent of businesses said up to half their servers had at least one outage. Organizations also showed that their backup jobs, on average, ended up with errors or could not complete within their allocated backup window 37% of the time.
That means potentially over one-third of all backups may not be restorable. The research also showed that one-third (34%) of all restorations fail to restore within the expected SLA.
What does this all mean? It means that with current legacy data protection, only 63% of backups will be successful AND 66% of restores will be successful, and ultimately, you’ll be able to recover less than half of the time (42%). What business can afford that kind of risk?
The need for modern cloud data protection now feels more pressing than ever. With the acceleration of cloud and modern delivery practices, and the liabilities of legacy backup and restoration, modern data protection is overwhelmingly necessary.
The priorities, according to the 3,000 organizations who took part in the research, include integrated cloud data protection and security (35%), cloud workload portability (36%), and ability to do disaster recovery via a cloud service (DRaaS) (38%).
As organizations modernize their IT services, we also see steady growth in cloud data protection. The results also show growth of BaaS (Backup-protection-as-a-Service) accelerating in response. The startling result here is the massive decline of on-prem tool usage, expected to be down over 50% within two years.
Backup is Shifting From On-Prem to Cloud-Based Solutions
This is an area where it is critical to be proactive, since a reactive migration to BaaS is going to mean lost data, lost revenue, and downtime. BaaS and DRaaS are the future of cloud data protection.
Typically, disaster recovery follows backup modernization trends, being tightly tied to the platforms, which remains the case here.
The results show a swing of 28% through 2023 to DRaaS first approaches. In particular, businesses are prioritizing cloud solutions managed by a service provider:
- Plans to reduce self-managed backups using exclusively on-premises solutions are on pace to decline as anticipated.
- Self-managed cloud is on track to slightly increase as anticipated.
- Cloud-based, BaaS-managed backup is increasing its adoption as planned for and anticipated.
BaaS and DRaaS are high-priority migrations for a future-minded business owner.
Cloud Workloads Need Cloud Data Protection
The facts are clear; outdated solutions and poorly optimized solutions cost you time and money while putting your data at risk. Modernizing and optimizing your current solution can provide new levels of confidence and operational excellence, ensuring your data is always protected and available, as well as many other economic and productivity benefits. Veeam’s backup and data recovery services are an excellent solution to this problem.
Recently Veeam sponsored IDC Research to develop a white paper targeting outcomes (IDC Research, The Economic Impact of Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform). Some of those results are included below to showcase measurable outcomes:
- 50% cost savings on data backup and recovery processes
- 33% fewer instances of data loss
- 72% increase in response time when problems arose
- 82% less downtime and data loss
These are compelling statistics, especially when compared to the true financial costs of downtime and data loss.
Conclusion
With the rapid change of IT strategy and faster adoption of modern services, businesses are under more pressure than ever to protect company data and ensure “always on” resiliency. Businesses can’t afford to leave their data protection solutions vulnerable.
With the increased adoption of cloud-based services, including the acceleration from the COVID-19 impact, cloud data protection has become a key tool in helping customers leverage modern technologies to have the biggest impact on their data availability strategy at the best cost.
If your data is at risk, but you need help finding an optimal data protection solution, contact Virtual Systems today. Our expert team has experience with cloud data security and will help you advance your security protocols. We’ll address your concerns about downtime and data loss and find a customized solution to protect your business.
References
Goodwin, P. and Marden, M. (2020, May 8). The Economic Impact of Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform. Framingham, MA: IDC Research. Retrieved from https://www.veeam.com/wp-idc-economic-impact-cloud-data-management.html
Buffington, J. and Russel, D. (2021, March 11). 2021 Data Protection Report. Columbus, OH: Veeam. Retrieved from https://www.veeam.com/wp-2021-data-protection-trends.html
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