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ONLY HALF

OF THE ORGANISATIONS RETAIN BACKUPS

OF THEIR CLOUD DATA .

“ 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 .”

The Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023 findings include :

Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS ):

The majority ( 90 %) of organisations realise they need to back up Microsoft 365 . The report revealed only one in nine ( 11 %) organisations do not protect their Microsoft 365 data – a promising majority of 89 % use third-party backups / BaaS or enhanced tiers of Microsoft 365 for legal hold or both .

And as data protection strategies have evolved and ransomware continues to be a top concern , most organisations are delegating backup responsibilities to backup specialists , instead of requiring each workload ( IaaS , SaaS , PaaS ) owner to protect their data . This fuels the progression of backup becoming a conventional component tasked to the traditional backup admin versus the application team .

Infrastructure-as-a-Service ( IaaS )

While organisations of all sizes now embrace hybrid-cloud architectures , it is not a oneway journey to the cloud that reduces the importance of the modern data centre .

Just 30 % of cloud-hosted workloads were from ‘ cloud first ’ strategies , whereby new workloads are starting in clouds at far faster rates than old workloads are being decommissioned in the data centre . While 98 % of organisations utilise a cloud-hosted infrastructure as part of their data protection strategy , including cloud-storage tiers , cloud infrastructure as their Disaster Recovery site or the use of BaaS / DRaaS providers .

The survey also found that 88 % of organisations brought workloads from the cloud back to their data centre for one or more reasons ( development , cost / performance optimisation or Disaster Recovery ), highlighting a need for 2023 data protection strategies to ensure consistent protection and the ability to migrate , as workloads move from data centres to cloud , cloud to data centres or from one cloud to another cloud .

Finally , the majority of backups of cloud workloads are now being done by the backup team and no longer require the specialised expertise or added burden of cloud administrators . However , while nearly every organisation acknowledged having long-term regulatory mandates , only half of the organisations retain backups of their cloud data for even one year .

Platform-as-a-Service ( PaaS )

While most organisations initially ‘ lift and shift ’ servers from the data centre to IaaS , most agree that running foundational IT scenarios , such as file shares or databases , as native cloud services is the future for mature IT workloads :

• 76 % run file services within cloud-hosted servers and 56 % run managed file shares from AWS or Microsoft Azure

• 78 % run databases within cloud-hosted servers and 65 % run managed databases from AWS or Microsoft Azure

Backup and Disaster Recovery-as-a- Service ( BaaS / DRaaS )

Nearly every IaaS / SaaS environment also utilises cloud services as part of its data protection strategy in some form .

More than half of organisations ( 58 %) utilise managed backup ( BaaS ) compared to the 42 % that utilise cloud storage as part of their self-managed data protection solution . Of special interest , nearly half ( 48 %) started with self-managed cloud storage but eventually switched to BaaS .

In addition , nearly every organisation ( 98 %) claims to use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy , though that varies