Modern Data Protection in a Digital World: Key Findings from Veeam's Data Protection Trends Report 2023

Veeam® Software, the leader in modern data protection, has released the findings of its fourth annual Data Protection Trends Report, which aims to provide insights into the evolving landscape of data protection in a digital world.

As organizations navigate the challenges of more complex hybrid IT environments, cyberattacks, and diversified production environments across various clouds, IT leaders are feeling the pressure to ensure they are adequately protected. The report highlights the need for modern data protection solutions and increased data protection budgets to keep businesses running.

Reliability and Success of Backups: A Top Priority

According to the report, improving the reliability and success of backups is a top priority for organizations this year, followed by ensuring that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) protection is equitable to the protection they rely on for datacenter-centric workloads.

Availability Gap and Protection Gap

The survey found that 82% of organizations have an 'Availability Gap' between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. Similarly, 79% of organizations have a 'Protection Gap' between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data.

Increase in Data Protection Budgets

Globally, organizations expect to increase their data protection budget in 2023 by 6.5%, which is notably higher than overall spending plans in other areas of IT. Of the 85% of organizations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3% and often in concert with increased investments in cybersecurity tools.

Ransomware is Winning the Battle

Despite increased preparedness, cyberattacks caused the most impactful outages for organizations in 2020, 2021, and 2022, according to the report. 85% of organizations were attacked at least once in the past 12 months, up from 76% in last year's report. Recovery from attacks is a main concern, as organizations reported that only 55% of their encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable. The report notes that the integration of data protection within a cyber preparedness strategy is the single most important aspect that organizations are looking for in a modern data protection solution.

Ransomware Hinders Digital Transformation

Due to the burden on budgets and manpower, ransomware and the current volatile cybersecurity landscape are taking priority for IT teams. This has caused IT resources and budgets originally allocated towards Digital Transformation initiatives to pivot to cyber prevention. Cyberattacks drain operational budgets from ransoms to recovery efforts, reducing organizations' ability to modernize for their future success; instead, they must pay for prevention and mitigation of the status quo.

Container-Centric Workloads are Growing in Popularity

Containers, and more specifically Kubernetes, are growing in popularity as a mainstream production platform. 52% of respondents are currently running containers, while 40% of organizations are planning to deploy them. However, most organizations are merely protecting the underlying storage, instead of holistically protecting the workloads themselves. This creates an opportunity for third-party backup tools to ensure comprehensive protection as new production platforms enter mainstream.

Final Thoughts

The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023 highlights the growing need for modern data protection solutions as organizations face more complex hybrid IT environments and an increased risk of cyberattacks. The report reveals that organizations are struggling to bridge the gap between their business units' expectations and what IT services can deliver. This disparity has led to increased data protection budgets, with a focus on improving the reliability and success of backups and ensuring equitable protection for IaaS and SaaS workloads.

The report also highlights the rise of container-centric workloads and the need for comprehensive protection solutions to mitigate the impact of ransomware attacks. As IT leaders face these dual challenges of complex hybrid environments and cyber threats, they need to prioritize modern data protection solutions to ensure their organizations' cyber resiliency.

Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam, said, "IT leaders are facing a dual challenge. They are building and supporting increasingly complex hybrid environments, while the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks is increasing. This is a major concern as leaders think through how they mitigate and recover business operations from any type of disruption. Legacy backup approaches won't address modern workloads - from IaaS and SaaS to containers - and result in an unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it's needed most. This is what’s focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan. They need Modern Data Protection,”