Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) in 2023

Veeam is proud to release the findings of yet another research project, the 2023 Data Protection Trends Report, which is the industry’s largest independent research on backup and data protection. This research is fully independent, representing the whole market — not just from Veeam customers — and by a third-party research organization.

The most important parts of a disaster recovery plan are not the technology, but rather:

  • How complete and comprehensive that plan is. The less a plan covers, the more manual activity, potentially with needing to research and learn in a crisis.
  • How valid or accurate the plan is when compared to current workloads and infrastructure environment. Think “configuration drift” here, meaning a plan from a year ago is less likely to capture the requirements and nuances of today’s implementation.

It is important to note that a plan with documentation-only is vastly different from a plan that is automated and able to execute most tasks on its own. This includes the ability to perform more regular testing and, ideally, to update recovery documentation.

Looking at the results below, the overall industry average is a test every five months. What we have seen since the pandemic began almost three years ago, is that many organizations experience significant changes in their workloads, infrastructure, and/or deployments models in less than half a year’s time.

Further, 14% of survey respondents states that they have not tested their plans in six months to three years. This puts them at risk dues to issues such as reworked applications, changed infrastructure and configuration drift and modified service level agreements (SLAs).

We have seen stronger cloud-adoption and interest among service providers in the last few years (see the blog in this series entitled “Cloudy Data Protection in 2023”). Below, data indicates that there is an even interest between on-premises and cloud-hosted recoveries, which rose 7% year-over-year toward cloud-hosted.

Even for organizations that are recovering on-premises, most recovered data will come from cloud-hosted backups.

With regard to disaster failover/failback, the goal is to shrink the time to resolution. However, organizations differ in how they will attempt to achieve this.

  • Pre-defined scripts was the most common response at 52%, but config drift might have come in to play, and even if accurate, most scripts assume that the original script authors are available to address any issues that arise. However, at least there is some automation involved.
  • Manual configuration was the next most common choice at 30%. This equates to human heroics during a crisis, under duress with management looking over the team’s shoulders, trying to figure out what has changed in the last half a year to multiple years in the environment. Hopefully, the team has the correct skills, access to the needed documentation and tools to conduct their tasks.
  • Orchestrated workflows is the method that we would have liked to see more of, but it only accounted for 18% of the responses. Here, best practices have been put into the workflow(s), with the ability to test the run book more frequently, placing fewer demands on the administrative team, which could lead to a more complete and faster return to operations.

We would like to connect with you on our LinkedIn Live sessions, where we will discuss this and other relevant results from this research. You can download the full document at 2023 Data Protection Trends Report.

If you have questions about this or any of Veeam’s other research projects, contact us at StrategicResearch@veeam.com.

 

About the 2023 Data Protection Report: Veeam’s Data Protection Report is the latest and largest research report on data protection ever in the history of backup and availability, as surveyed by an independent research firm with 4,200 responses from 28 countries. Download the full 2023 Data Protection Trends Report to get access to all the latest data protection insights. Want to learn more about enterprise backup solutions at Veeam? Visit the Veeam Enterprise Backup Solutions Page.

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