Veeam Software has published Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, covering four key ‘as a Service’ areas: 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-based report found that companies are recognizing the increasing need to protect their SaaS environments. For example, nearly 90 percent 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.
Other key highlights include:
- While new IT workloads are launching in the cloud at far faster rates than old workloads are being decommissioned in the data center, a surprising 88 percent brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center for one or more reasons, including development, cost/performance optimization and disaster recovery.
- With cyber security (including ransomware) continuing to be a critical concern, data protection strategies have evolved, and most organizations 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 now being done by the backup team and no longer require the specialized expertise or added burden of cloud administrators.
- Today, 98 percent of organizations utilize 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 planning, implementation and testing.
- 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 percent of organizations do not yet back up their cloud-hosted file shares, and 15 percent 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 cyber security threats continue to increase, organizations 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 centers 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.”
Backup and disaster recovery as a service (BaaS/DRaaS)
- Nearly every IaaS/SaaS environment also utilizes cloud services as part of their data protection strategy in some form.
- 58 percent of organizations utilize managed backup (BaaS) compared to the 42 percent that utilize cloud storage as part of their self-managed data protection solution. Of special interest, nearly half (48 percent) started with self-managed cloud storage but eventually switched to BaaS.
- BaaS is predominantly sought for gaining operational and economic efficiencies, as well as assuring data survivability from disasters and ransomware attacks. It is notable that BaaS is no longer seen as the ‘tape killer’ that early pundits offered, with organizations stating that nearly 50 percent of their data is still stored on tape during its lifecycle, regardless of their use of cloud-based data protection services.
- DRaaS is perceived as surpassing the tactical benefits of BaaS by providing expertise around business continuity and disaster recovery planning, implementation, and testing. Expertise is perceived as a primary differentiator by subscribers choosing their BaaS/DRaaS provider, based on business acumen, technical IT recovery architects, and operational assistance in planning and documentation of business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.
- 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 also point to challenges over the past year with the IT talent supply chain.
About the report
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 that surveyed 1,700 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.
Download additional details from the Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023 at https://vee.am/CPT23 (registration required).
