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 and represents the whole market — not just from Veeam customers. It was conducted by a third-party research organization with no one knowing that Veeam was involved.
Over the last four years, Veeam has been surveying organizations’ mix of on-prem physical, on-prem virtual and cloud hosted servers. Now having asked this question for four straight years, what you see below comes from over 12,000 data points. Each year we asked what the current server mix was, and what the mix was projected to be two years in the future. Over time, we replaced some of the two-year anticipated mixes with the actual results.
What we notice is that 2020 to 2021 saw the most dramatic changes, as the pandemic forced abrupt changes in many data center plans. But looking at 2023 and beyond, we see that server mix is normalizing out. Physical servers do not disappear, even by 2025, but by 2024 we could see just over half of the data center servers running in a hyperscaler or at managed service provider’s location.
From a backup solution’s perspective, this mix is interesting as it means that most organizations will need to deploy a backup product that can handle a variety of workloads and deployment models, such as on-prem physical, on-prem and off-prem virtual, cloud, SaaS and Kubernetes, or be forced to run several standalone tools to meet their data protection requirements.
We hope to connect with you on our LinkedIn Live sessions where we will discuss this and other fascinating results from this research. Remember to download the full report at 2023 Data Protection Trends Report.
If you have questions about this, or any of Veeam’s many other research projects, feel free to 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.