New research claims that IT leaders are concerned about the security they currently have to defend against cyberattacks, but are willing to pay money to strengthen their protections.
Veeam’s fourth annual data protection trends report (Opens in a new tab) It surveyed more than 4,000 IT leaders and those involved in implementing cybersecurity strategies across organizations, and found that the adoption of hybrid work contributed to this unease.
He noted how new challenges are emerging with the increasing shift of digital infrastructure away from the premises, as organizations look to cloud document storage and cloud hosting providers, forcing them to increase their IT budgets in response.
The ‘gaps’ must be closed.
When setting goals for the rest of this year, the survey found that IT leaders want to prioritize backup implementations, as well as ensure that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are just as secure as data center workloads.
For the organizations themselves, the vast majority felt there was a gap in what they wanted and what their IT teams could deliver. More specifically, there was a perceived “availability gap” of 82% between the required and actual speeds for restoring stored data.
Nearly 80% of organizations also complained of a “protection gap”, where the amount of potential data loss is greater than the frequency of data protection by IT departments.
These gaps are the reason why more than half of the organizations surveyed want to change their protections for this year, and they serve as justification for the increase in spending on data protection as well, which is expected to rise on average by 8.3% for 85% of organizations, which is much higher than the areas The other is to spend on information technology.
Based on recent years, this protection is very much needed. Cyberattacks, especially ransomware, have been the biggest disruptions to organizations’ systems every year since 2020, with more than 80% stating they were attacked at least once in the past year, a whopping 76% increase from Veeam’s previous report.
Data recovery was of paramount importance to them, as only 55% of stolen data was salvaged. Organizations highlighted “integrating data protection into a cyber preparedness strategy” as the main focus of protection solutions.
A corollary of ransomware attacks, in addition to the initial damage they cause, is a drain on IT teams’ resources and budgets, forcing them to postpone upgrades to the enterprise digital landscape and focus on recovery efforts and the fallout from such attacks instead.
Containers such as Kubernettes are also growing in popularity – just over half of the respondents said they had planned for it. But the report lamented the fact that “the same kinds of discrepancies in data protection strategy seen in early adopters of SaaS five years ago or virtualization 15 years ago” are recurring.
The problem is that only the volume is protected, while the overall approach to protecting workloads is neglected. The report indicated that this is the usual behavior after adopting new platforms.
“Legacy backup methods won’t handle modern workloads — from IaaS and SaaS to containers — and result in slow, unreliable business recovery when you need it most,” said Danny Allan, CTO of Veeam.
“This is what IT leaders have in mind when they think about their cyber resilience plan. They need modern data protection.”