Veeam is proud to release the findings of yet another independent research project, the 2024 Data Protection Trends Report. This is the fifth annual release of the Data Protection Trends Report in its current methodology to quantify the challenges and drivers of the data protection industry, always using independent analyst and research firms to garner an impartial understanding of how data protection must continue to evolve. For 2024, 1,200 IT leaders and implementers from all over the world were surveyed to better understand not just the global market and trends, but the nuances across regions and industries.
Key Revelations From This Year’s Research
- 2024 is another year for changing solutions, with 53% looking for alternatives to their current backup product or service
- 2024 could also be a year for changing roles. In fact, 47% of respondents expressed an intent to seek a new job outside of their current organization within the next twelve months
- Reliable protection of IaaS and SaaS are enterprises’ priorities. For the second straight year, the two most important considerations for “enterprise backup” solutions are reliability and the protection of cloud-hosted workloads (IaaS and SaaS)
- Reliability and preparing against ransomware continue to be the top reasons why organizations are looking for new data protection solutions or services
- ‘Modern’ in 2024 must be cyber-integrated and hybrid-flexible. For two years in a row now, survey respondents have considered the most common and most important aspect of a modern data protection solution to be one that integrates with cybersecurity tools. Two out of five (41%) consider some aspect of mobility in cloud scenarios as most important characteristic of a modern solution
- 74% of organizations protect their Microsoft 365 data which is a huge increase over when most incorrectly assumed that the recycle bin was ‘good enough’ when DPR first surveyed in 2020
- Containers are everywhere, but their backups are scattered. Container usage continues to rise, with 59% of enterprises running them in production and another 37% either rolling them out or planning to
- Get your data out of the building since every cyber or other disaster preparedness plan has to start with survivable data
- Organizations are challenged to balance their investments in cyber preparedness and ESG goals against IT modernization and Digital Transformation
- Cyberattacks were the most common and most impactful causes of outages (again). For the fourth straight year, cyberattacks were listed as the most common and most impactful causes of business outages across organizations
- Ransomware is still a ‘when’ more than an ‘if’ with 76% of organizations experiencing an attack at least once in the past 12 months
- If you needed to recover from a cyberattack or other disaster, could you? Most can’t, but you should check out the report to see the specific data on why not and how badly this can affect organizations
Taking These Predictions Into 2024
As we continue into 2024, we will be releasing several blogs to help take a more in-depth look at these topics, so keep checking back in to learn more about the different factors and the variety of data protection trends that will be coloring the IT world this year. Some of the most notable insights we will be addressing include:
- Reliability and consistency (of protecting IaaS and SaaS alongside data center servers) are the key drivers for improving data protection in 2024. For organizations that are struggling to protect cloud hosted data with legacy backup solutions, it is likely they will supplement their data center backup solution with IaaS/PaaS and/or SaaS capabilities
- Ransomware is both the most common and most impactful cause of outages, but it would be irresponsible to over rotate your data protection solution to be singularly focused on cyber preparedness, because other disasters (fire, flood, etc.) and user errors (overwrites, deletion, etc.) still occur. That said, ensuring your data recovery tools can integrate with other cyber detection and remediation technologies is paramount for comprehensive cyber resilience
- Cloud-based services seem nearly inevitable for organizations of all sizes. But similar to how there isn’t just one type of production cloud, there isn’t just one protection cloud scenario. Organizations should consider cloud tiers for retention, Backup as a Service (BaaS), and ultimately Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
About the Research Report
This analysis covers the opinions of 1,200 unbiased organizations. Veeam has commissioned analysts or research firms eight times over 10 years to produce an industry report on the evolving data protection landscape for the purposes of affecting its product strategy as well as helping the market be better informed. These research endeavors were conducted using ‘double-blind’ surveys, whereby the research firms’ respondents were unaware who was seeking the data and Veeam had no visibility or effect on who responded to the survey beyond defining the persona of ‘IT Leader or Implementer responsible for data protection strategies within their organization’.
If you have questions about this, or any of Veeam’s many other research projects, feel free to contact us at StrategicResearch@veeam.com.