Backing up your company’s data has always been essential. It protects you from accidental deletion, cyber-attacks and is vital for regulatory compliance. But data protection is getting harder than ever – especially as more organisations use a mix of cloud, virtual desktop and on-premises servers to store business information.
So how are your peers managing this complexity? In the 2021 Veeam Data Protection Report, the cloud software provider highlighted several key trends emerging in data backup. In a survey of over 3000 businesses worldwide, Veeam has produced a comprehensive picture of the state of data protection worldwide.
You can access the full report here, but to understand what other firms are doing – and how your company compares – we have summarised some of the key points from the Veeam study.
How are companies dealing with data protection in 2021?
With the pandemic causing economic disruption, millions of people working remotely, and with a huge rise in cybercrime, Veeam’s Data Protection Report provides a timely insight into how your peers are managing. Here are some of the key findings from their survey:
- Companies have complex data protection strategies
If you are concerned that your data protection stance is complicated, you are certainly not alone. Veeam’s study shows that most organisations are using a diverse mix of methods to store company data, including on physical servers, virtual machines, and the cloud. Storing data in multiple environments and ensuring it is all backed up is definitely a challenge.
- Many struggle with data protection
The complexity of companies’ storage methods – and the growing range of threats to the data they store – means that many firms are struggling to protect key information. Inadequate backup or failure to meet Service Level Agreements is by far and away the biggest data protection challenge reported in 2021, with 41% choosing this as their most significant threat.
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- Shift away from self-managed backup
At the beginning of the cloud era, many companies took care of backups internally. However as hybrid cloud and SaaS continues to grow, the Veeam study found that traditional approaches are failing to offer the protection companies need.
- Back up not meeting expectations
For most firms, there was a massive gap between their expectations of data protection, compared with the reality. A huge 80% reported availability gaps between how fast they could recover applications compared to how fast they actually need applications to be recovered. There was also a massive protection gap – 76% said that data was backed up much less frequently than they could afford to lose it.
- Strategies emerging for data protection
The research also looked at trends in strategies for backing up data. It revealed that in 2021 34% of firms manage backup themselves on-premises, 33% self-manage backups with cloud services and 33% use a cloud-based backup service to do it automatically.
While there is currently an even split between these strategies, there is a strong trend towards using more cloud-based backup – by 2023 46% expect to be using cloud-based backup. This is where a third-party cloud data and application backup company stores the data for customers in another cloud environment. The study also showed there will be a significant reduction in the number of companies relying on traditional self-managed backup in the next two years – only 19% will use this method in 2023.
- Reported benefits of cloud-based backup
What is behind this trend in moving to cloud-based backups? The Veeam research noted several benefits which organisations experience, including improved recovery point, reduction in costs and more reliable backups. This technology also helps with budgeting. When organisations pay for backup as monthly OpEx rather than expensive CapEx, the cost of data protection becomes easier to manage.
How does your back up and data protection posture compare?
As Veeam’s research demonstrates, there is a real demand for change when it comes to how companies manage their data and SaaS applications. A growing number of firms are unable to satisfactorily backup their cloud data and many are struggling with the sheer complexity of backing up data across multiple environments.
In response to this challenge, some organisations are opting for a cloud-based backup solution. These tools let you back up data and SaaS applications from multiple on-premises and cloud locations at the frequency you need. That gives you the peace of mind that your content is always safe, whatever happens.
FITTS can help you modernise your approach to backup and data protection with our cloud backup services. To learn how we can help you with modern data protection best practise, contact us today.
