Top trends to follow in data protection for 2022
An executive briefing by Veeam described ways for adapting to Modern Data Protection. In the last months of 2021, an independent research company surveyed IT decision-makers and IT professionals from 3,000 companies.
Respondents from organizations with more than 1,000 employees in 28 different countries gave their predictions on data protection drivers and strategies for 2022. This annual study of Data Protection Trends summarizes the study results, and as Veeam shared: “provides an understanding of the current market landscape on data protection, disaster recovery, cybersecurity/ransomware, and containers”.
New Modern IT is between “Hybrid” and “Multi”
50/50 is the approximate ratio of on-premises servers and cloud-hosted servers.
67% of organizations use cloud service as part of their Data Protection (DP) strategy, according to the report. Based on the data, there’s a good mix of both physical and virtual platforms. Logically, data protection strategy needs to include physical, virtual, and multiple cloud-hosted workloads.
As the report noted: “On average, respondents expected their organization’s budget for data protection, including both backup and BC/DR, to increase by 5.9% globally in 2022 — 6.0% in Europe”.
The “Gap” between business expectations and IT delivery has never been worse
- 88% of IT leaders believe their organizations have an “availability gap” between the SLAs expected and how quickly IT can return to productivity.
- 87% of IT leaders believe their organizations have a “protection gap” between how much data they can afford to lose and how often data is protected.
- 40% of servers have at least one unexpected outage
The difference between high-priority data and normal data is almost none.
On a global level, the difference between data loss of “high-priority” data and “normal” data has a data loss tolerance of no more than one hour. 56% vs. 49% for the second type of data tells us two things:
- all data matters everywhere
- proactive backup and disaster recovery policy should work together. For example, 36% of data on average was unrecoverable after a ransomware attack
Data protection in 2022?
The Covid-19 pandemic and rapid digitalization intensified the need for IT modernization. As the report mentioned, many organizations recognized, that their protection has not modernized at the same rate as their technology upgrades, even though their dependency on data and their dissatisfaction with the status quo are both at an all-time high.
That leads to 3 major trends:
- increased investment in data protection
- qualitative improvement in reliability
- data protection is driven by a “when” not an “if scenario.
A full report can be found here.