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 only from Veeam customers — and was conducted by a third-party research organization.
Veeam has been asking many of the same questions for four years now, which yields powerful trending and future predictive capabilities. Cloud interest, and utilization of the cloud for data protection continues to rise. Below, see actual responses from the past four years, and see from the last two years, 2022 and 2023, what two years into the future mix is projected to be.
- Much like other spikes in cloud adoption that began with the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and leading in to 2021, we see an increase in cloud adoption for backup using cloud-services as part of an overall data protection strategy.
- In the next two years, respondents report that they will consume even more cloud services than they have in the last three years.
The same cloud-powered trends shift from backup to disaster recovery.
- Cloud usage for Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) jumped from 36% in 2022 to an anticipated 47% in 2023.
- The future protections also move up to 55% over the next two years, noting that by next year, the majority indicate that the cloud will be a core part of their disaster recovery approach.
- Overall, the data reflects a belief that current, self-managed data centers for BC/DR are giving way to utilizing cloud-infrastructure and/or a DRaaS provider.
Next, we looked at using service providers via Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and/or Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to implement cloud-powered data protection. The self-reported interest in cloud-powered data protection is not only extraordinarily strong, as we can see above, but the interest in and likelihood of using a service provider for some or most of an organization’s servers is also exceedingly high.
Below, we shade out the No, Unlikely and Possibly BaaS and DRaaS utilization responses and see that a strong majority, 81% of 4,200 respondents, state that in the next two years, they are Very Likely to or Almost Certainly will protect most or all servers via BaaS or DRaaS.
While there can be many reasons for such a strong interest in BaaS and DRaaS, we note the following potential contributing factors:
- Desire to free up the team for other activities
- Skills gaps, or lack of in-house expertise
- Rising Service Level Agreements (SLAs), increasing amounts of data and elongating retention, making current approaches no longer tenable for the future
- Supply chain constraints and the lack of ability to acquire infrastructure
- Economics, rent and pay via OpEx, versus pay upfront via CapEx
In the video below, we also delve into the average length of retention for data, and how this is achieved. The results may surprise you! Hint, tape is still in usage for many.
Note: If you are interested in cloud data protection, we encourage you to download another Veeam research report, 2023 Cloud Protection Trends. Veeam commissioned this report utilizing an independent research firm, which surveyed 1,700 unbiased IT leaders with production workloads that run on cloud services in production or for protection about their perspectives, methodologies and responsibilities in protecting, securing and managing their cloud‑hosted data.
We would like to connect with you on our LinkedIn Live sessions where we will discuss this and other fascinating results from this research. Download the full report 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.