Organisations are increasing modern data protection for cloud workloads

Issue 1 2023 Information Security

Veeam Software has released the findings of the company’s Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023; covering four key ‘as a Service’ scenarios: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (BaaS/DRaaS). The survey found that companies are recognising the increasing need to protect their SaaS environments. For example, nearly 90% of Microsoft 365 customers surveyed use supplemental measures rather than relying solely on built-in recovery capabilities. Preparing for a rapid recovery from cyber and ransomware attacks was the top cited reason for this backup, with regulatory compliance the next most popular business driver.

Highlights of the report:

• While new IT workloads are launching in the cloud at far faster rates than old workloads are decommissioned in the data centre, a surprising 88% brought workloads from the cloud back to their data centre for one or more reasons, including development, cost/performance optimisation and disaster recovery.

• With cybersecurity (including ransomware) continuing to be a critical concern, data protection strategies have evolved, and most organisations are delegating backup responsibilities to specialists, instead of requiring each workload (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) owner to protect their own data. The majority of backups of cloud workloads are done by the backup team, and no longer require the specialised expertise or added burden of cloud administrators.

• Today, 98% of organisations use a cloud-hosted infrastructure as part of their data protection strategy. DRaaS is perceived as surpassing the tactical benefits of BaaS, by providing expertise around business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning, implementation and testing. Subscribers choosing their BaaS/DRaaS provider recognise expertise as a primary differentiator. This is based on business acumen, technical IT recovery architects, and operational assistance in planning and documentation of BCDR strategies.

• Unfortunately, as is often the case for new cloud-hosted architectures, some PaaS administrators are incorrectly presuming that the native durability of cloud-hosted services relieves the need for backup.

• 34% of organisations do not yet back up their cloud-hosted file shares, and 15% do not back up their cloud-hosted databases.

“The growing adoption of cloud-powered tools and services, escalated by the massive shift to remote work and current hybrid work environments, put a spotlight on hybrid IT and data protection strategies across industries,” said Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. “As cybersecurity threats continue to increase, organisations must look beyond traditional backup services and build a purposeful approach that best suits their business needs and cloud strategy. This survey shows that workloads continue to fluidly move from data centres to clouds and back again, as well as from one cloud to another — creating even more complexity in data protection strategy. The results of this survey show that while modern IT enterprises have made significant strides in cloud and data protection, there is still work to be done.”

This year’s report showed a significant shift from last year as customers are increasingly interested in outsourcing their backups and gaining a ‘turnkey’ or ‘white-glove’ level of management service instead of the internal IT staff continuing to manage BaaS-delivered infrastructure. This shift indicates that experience and trust in providers is increasing and could point to challenges over the past year with the IT talent supply chain.

The Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, born from the annual Veeam Data Protection Trends Report, is the result of a third-party research firm. It surveyed 1700 unbiased IT leaders from 7 countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand) on their use of cloud services in both production and protection scenarios, to deliver the largest single view into the trajectory of hybrid strategies across the modern IT enterprise in today’s cloud-first digital landscape. The broad-based market study was conducted to understand the various perspectives on responsibilities and methodologies related to operating and protecting cloud-hosted workloads, and considerations when using cloud-powered data protection.

Download additional details from the Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023 at https://vee.am/CPT23.




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