What is Cloud Data Management?

Data protection, a critical component of Cloud Data Management, has now become the heart and soul of many organizations. It’s not just simply about backing up and restoring data but extending your capabilities to reuse and get the most from that data. However, many organizations still rely on legacy systems to protect their data without fully knowing the impact this can have on their business.

Organizations that continue with legacy data protection can face significant obstacles, not only in potentially blocking Digital Transformation efforts but in supporting their core business. Consider that 95% of all organizations suffer unexpected outages — on average, 117 minutes. The cost of an hour of downtime can be over $67,000 per application, yet any downtime can have significant financial impacts to your business and brand.¹

Gone are the days where a nightly backup is enough. With over 51% of high priority applications backed up at least hourly and 97% at least twice per day, the industry is clearly looking for more recovery points (RPO) and seeking to minimize downtime.¹

Organizations spend an average of $484,591 on Cloud Data Management technologies annually. Using modern data protection, you can expect to reduce that by an average of 49% and increase RPO by 55%.²

Downtime has a direct effect on cost and application availability but also has other implications. With an outage, customer confidence is also at stake, along with potential damage to your company brand and lost revenue. However, it’s not just customers who can be impacted by downtime. Employees also want something from your business, which is why loss of employee confidence is the third top concern related to application downtime.

By ensuring fast and reliable recovery of data, the right data protection solution allows you to increase your backup teams’ productivity by 74% while helping to reassure customers that their data is in good hands.³

Cloud Data Management can reduce impacts beyond downtime and improve business continuity confidence by 53%.⁴

In addition to unexpected downtimes, enterprises may also be vulnerable to cyberthreats, which disrupt businesses by attacking data or even holding it for ransom. In mid-2018, the average ransomware payment was $41,198.⁵ By late 2019, that price more than doubled to $84,166. With Cloud Data Management, 96% of organizations cut their average ransomware payments to $5,000, with 76% of companies paying nothing.⁶ Modernizing to a new Cloud Data Management platform helps your organization detect, prevent and defend against cyberthreats.

An organization fell victim to ransomware every 14 seconds in 2019. It’s expected to be every 11 seconds in 2021.⁷

In the hybrid and multi-cloud world, data protection is more important than ever. Data and applications are spread across data centers and clouds (like AWS and Azure) through file sharing, shared storage and even Software as a Service (SaaS)-based platforms. By using tools designed for on-premises backup, you sacrifice time and resources while putting your data at risk.

Cloud Data Management helps accelerate your data protection capabilities while maximizing potential across governance, security and productivity.

When it comes to the challenge of protecting and managing data, eight out of nine businesses state that they’re struggling, many due to a lack of resources.⁸

The lack of time, budget and resources also compromises critical aspects of your business — such as app development, governance and security — as well as the performance of your systems, which either need to be multiplied to meet your expanded footprint or managed through increased manual tasks.

Adopting Cloud Data Management enables your organization to free up allocated resources and budget, expanding your operational excellence and opening the door for further innovation.

New problems are arising that will have a significant impact on your organization’s ability to modernize. Cyberthreats, including ransomware, have grown exponentially in the recent year and are now the top issue facing most organizations. Beyond this, we’re all facing uncertainty through economic, geo-political and industry disruption. Still, in situations that can’t be controlled, you need to double down on the areas where your organization will continue to see growth potential.

By modernizing your old platforms, you can address your organization’s frequently changing customer needs and ransomware threats, as well as lessen the impact of skills shortage by freeing up vital resources.

With multi-platform, multi-cloud environments, being able to restore from backup isn’t enough. Many organizations now have thousands of virtual machines, connected applications and data stored in numerous ways.

Modern data management must be able to support on-premises workloads, as well as Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for cloud-based workloads — all within a single interface. Data must be flexible and fluid, able to move between clouds and on-premises with no propriety lock-in. Plus, automation, security and data reuse remain crucial to drive operational efficiency and business acceleration.

Your Cloud Data Management platform must be able to support all environments — physical, virtual, multi-cloud and SaaS — within a single intuitive interface.

As companies explore their Digital Transformation, cloud adoption is growing considerably. By 2022, 41% of all servers will be running on a commercial cloud platform. Today, businesses are using cloud-based services for about half of their backups, with over 18% not backed up at all.⁹

The cloud is driving new business practices and operations, and with this, data protection is also changing. While many companies still currently use their on-premises backup systems to extend to the cloud through limited agent backup (33%), by 2022 the industry hopes to use cloud-based solutions for more than three-fourths (77%) of backups⁹ — reducing the use of legacy on-premises tools by almost half.

By 2022, more than 77% of all cloud backups will use native cloud-based services. Cloud Data Management solutions must be able to work seamlessly across cloud native and on-premises data services.⁹

With the current industry disruption, you may wonder whether it makes sense to adopt new Cloud Data Management platforms now. Yet even though unexpected economic disruption, embracing modern backup services is crucial for growth and your ability to accelerate projects.

A core part of that growth is business continuity, including reducing backup failures while improving RPO and recovery time objective (RTO) service level agreements (SLAs) — ensuring confidence that your platform remains always on and always ready.

Cloud Data Management reduces operating costs while increasing the attainment of SLAs and the success rate of backups — reducing complexity, unifying management and expanding your portfolio to the cloud.

Entrepreneurs understand the importance of cultivating an intelligent business for their future success, and this starts with a strong data protection and management foundation. By harnessing these capabilities, business leaders and IT get a clearer view of what’s happening across the organization and deliver data that’s fast and reliable.

Cloud Data Management goes beyond backup. It’s the next step in Digital Transformation, bringing enterprises backup modernization, hybrid cloud acceleration, data security and governance.

Digital Transformation provides many advantages. Modernizing your business operations and processes can have a significant impact on customer service, cost reduction and employee productivity. However, while over 80% of organizations are in the process of or planning transformation,¹⁰ many projects face significant obstacles.

Staffing issues remain the main barrier to Digital Transformation initiatives. With company IT resources keeping legacy systems active, time and budget is dedicated toward maintaining aging platforms and manual processes, slowing modernization and the cultivating of skills considerably.

With Cloud Data Management, your organization gains flexibility and enhances the critical value of data — returning real savings to your business to better overcome Digital Transformation challenges.

Backup modernization frees the resources committed to legacy data protection and focuses them on core innovation projects to propel businesses forward. Through Veeam Cloud Data Management, organizations are cutting the cost of data backup and protection by 50% and achieving a 55% increase in data backup and recovery efficiency.¹¹ Enterprises that build on modern backup platform can make their environment future-proof to ensure sustained protection as they grow across the cloud and other platforms. These organizations can also use intelligent automation for successful backups and verified recoveries, and reuse data for application development, workload testing, data mining and reporting

Cloud Data Management enables you to deliver efficient increases in backup and protection across clouds, complete visibility, intelligent recovery orchestration and automated data reuse.

For most organizations, what hinders cloud adoption is data migration. Part of the reason is that the current processes to manage and protect data are highly integrated into legacy on-premises solutions. However, the adoption of modern backup systems is driving rapid cloud adoption through the unification of tools — ensuring over 49% savings in hybrid cloud protection.

Through the adoption of a single data protection system, you can vastly reduce time for issue resolution while tapping into centralized intelligence for better capacity and management planning. Data becomes more mobile, not trapped within propriety formats and systems. Modern cloud protection also enables a greater services-first approach, lowering management and operational costs

Legacy systems trap data in propriety formats and systems, but a hybrid cloud system makes data mobile, flowing from site to cloud, and cloud to cloud without restrictions.

Regulations are continually changing, as is the cost of compliance each year — impacting any organization’s security and governance posture. Relying on manual processes increases the risk that cyberattacks go unnoticed and compounds the effort necessary to track compliance, as using legacy or ad hoc cloud systems to protect and audit data creates isolated pockets of visibility.

By adopting solutions like Cloud Data Management, 77% of customers saw a reduced risk of data loss, as well as 17% of customers seeing reduction in both audit and compliance failure. Increased security auditing also decreases the impact of attacks such as ransomware, where 76% of organizations adopting Cloud Data Management have zero financial impact when attacked and 96% less than $5,000.¹²

Cloud Data Management ensures application security, compliance and privacy requirements before deployment — without impacting your production system or increasing cost.