According to a new survey by Veeam, organizations are becoming more aware of the need to safeguard their SaaS environments. For instance, approximately 90% of Microsoft 365 users polled employ additional procedures in addition to the system’s built-in recovery tools. The top reported reason for this backup was preparing for a quick recovery from cyber and ransomware assaults, with regulatory compliance coming in as the second most preferred business motive.
Only 1 in 9 (11%) businesses do not safeguard their Microsoft 365 data, according to Veeam’s Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, covering four key ‘as-a-Service’ scenarios: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Backup- and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (BaaS/DRaaS). A “promising” 89% of businesses employ third-party backups/BaaS, improved Microsoft 365 tiers for legal hold, or both.
Instead of expecting each workload owner (IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS) to protect their own data, more enterprises are delegating backup obligations to backup experts as data security tactics have matured and ransomware continues to be a top worry, according to Veeam’s latest study. This would accelerate the development of backup into a standard component assigned to the traditional backup administrator rather than the application team.
Other highlights of the Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023 would include the following:
- Unexpectedly, 88% of companies brought workloads from the cloud back to their data centers for one or more reasons, including development, cost/performance optimization, and disaster recovery, even though new IT workloads are launching in the cloud at much faster rates than old workloads are being decommissioned in the data center.
- Data protection tactics have changed as a result of the continued importance of cybersecurity (including ransomware), and most businesses now outsource backup duties to experts rather than forcing each workload (IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS) owner to safeguard their own data. The bulk of cloud workload backups are now completed by the backup team, eliminating the need for cloud administrators' specialized knowledge or additional effort.
- A cloud-hosted infrastructure is used by 98% of businesses nowadays as part of their data protection strategy. By offering experience in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) planning, implementation, and testing, DRaaS is thought to transcend the tactical advantages of BaaS. Customers choose their BaaS/DRaaS supplier based on business acumen, technical IT recovery architects, and operational aid in developing and documenting BCDR plans. Expertise is considered as a significant difference in this process.
- Unfortunately, some PaaS administrators believe mistakenly that the natural durability of cloud-hosted services eliminates the need for backup, as is frequently the case for new cloud-hosted architectures: 15% of businesses do not now back up their cloud-hosted databases, while 34% of businesses do not yet back up their cloud-hosted file shares.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Although hybrid-cloud architectures are increasingly adopted by businesses of all sizes, the value of the contemporary data center has not diminished as a result of this one-way migration to the cloud, according to the Veeam report.- Cloud-first initiatives, in which new workloads are started in clouds at rates far quicker than old workloads are decommissioned in the data center, accounted for 30% of workloads that were housed in the cloud.
- The usage of cloud-hosted infrastructure, including cloud storage tiers, cloud infrastructure as a disaster recovery location, or the use of BaaS/DRaaS providers, accounts for 98% of enterprises' data security strategies.
- For one or more reasons (development, cost/performance optimization, or disaster recovery), 88% of organizations moved workloads from the cloud back to their data center. This shows the need for 2023 data protection strategies to ensure consistent protection and the ability to migrate as workloads move from data center to cloud, cloud to cloud, or from one cloud to another cloud.
- The bulk of cloud workload backups are now completed by the backup team, eliminating the need for cloud administrators' specialized knowledge or additional effort. Despite the fact that almost all firms reported having lengthy regulatory requirements, just half of them kept backups of their cloud data for even a single year.
Platform-as-a-Service
Most firms ‘lift and move’ servers from the data center to IaaS initially, but most agree that the future of mature IT workloads involves operating core IT scenarios, such as file sharing or databases, and native cloud-services.- 56% of respondents operate managed file shares from AWS or Microsoft Azure, while 76% run file services on cloud-hosted servers
- 78% operate databases on servers hosted in the cloud, while 65% use managed databases from AWS or Azure
Backup- and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service
Cloud services are used in some capacity by almost every IaaS/SaaS environment as part of their data security strategy.- 42% of businesses use cloud storage as part of their self-managed data protection solution, compared to 58% that use managed backup (BaaS). Particularly noteworthy would be the fact that almost half (48%) first used self-managed cloud storage before switching to BaaS.
- Nearly all businesses (98%) claim to employ cloud services as part of their data security plan, albeit these range from basic BaaS or DRaaS offerings to cloud storage used as a repository.
- Operational and financial efficiencies, as well as ensuring data survival from calamities and ransomware attacks, are the main reasons that BaaS is sought after. It is noteworthy that BaaS is no longer seen as the ‘tape killer’ that early commentators proposed, with firms reporting that, despite their usage of cloud-based data protection services, approximately 50% of their data is still kept on tape during its lifespan.
- Given its competence in BCDR design, implementation, and testing, DRaaS is thought to outweigh the tactical advantages of BaaS. Based on business savvy, technical IT recovery architects, and operational aid in establishing and documenting BCDR policies, customers view expertise as the major distinction when selecting their BaaS/DRaaS supplier.
Turnkey Management BaaS
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“This survey shows that workloads continue to fluidly move from data centers to clouds and back again, as well as from one cloud to another - creating even more complexity in data protection strategy,” said Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of Product Strategy at Veeam.
The report for this year demonstrated a significant change from the report for the previous year, as customers are becoming more interested in outsourcing their backups and obtaining a ‘turnkey’ or ‘white-glove’ level of management service as opposed to continuing to have the internal IT staff manage BaaS-delivered infrastructure. This trend might also be a sign of supply chain issues with IT skills during the previous year, as it shows that experience and trust in suppliers are growing.
The Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, which evolved from the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report, is the outcome of a third-party research company that polled 1,700 objective IT leaders from 7 different nations (the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) about their use of cloud services in both production and protection scenarios.
The goal of the survey was to provide the most comprehensive look at the trajectory of hybrid strategies across modern IT enterprises in today’s cloud-first era. The comprehensive market survey was carried out to comprehend the numerous viewpoints on duties and techniques associated to managing and safeguarding workloads stored in the cloud, as well as factors to be taken into account when employing cloud-powered data protection.
