TOP DATA BACKUP TRENDS 2022

Decision-makers in Germany face an availability gap and a data security gap. Ransomware is a reality, so data backup and recovery are urgently needed.

The change in the IT world is progressing faster and faster. But what concrete measures do companies take to ensure modern data backup? Between October and December 2021, an independent market research company commissioned by Veeam surveyed more than 3,000 IT decision-makers in the “Data Protection Trends Report for 2022 “, which factors are important to them about IT and data protection and which strategies they are pursuing in 2022.

Almost all survey participants belong to companies with more than 1,000 employees. They come from 28 different countries, 283 of them from Germany.

Respondents expect their organization’s data protection (both backup and business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR)) budgets to increase in 2022 by 5.6% in Germany.

In the wake of the corona pandemic, the exit restrictions and supply chain problems have stagnated the implementation of new local IT systems and, at the same time, led to faster implementation of cloud initiatives. Against the background of these special circumstances, it is plausible that companies will invest heavily in data protection solutions in 2022 to meet the requirements of the different production environments.

Better RPO and RTO demanded

20% of companies cited lower costs as the top reason for switching to another backup solution. Another 20% wanted more reliability and shorter recovery point objectives (RPOs) and lower recovery time objectives (RTOs).

70% of companies use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy. 76% of organizations have experienced at least one ransomware attack in the past year.

In 2022, German companies will use 27% physical servers, 22% virtual servers and 51% cloud-based servers. Two conclusions can be drawn from these trends:

• The data centre lives on. There are many good reasons for running workloads on-premises as there are for running them in the cloud, even for organizations with a cloud-first strategy.
• Your data protection strategy must balance physical, virtual, and cross-cloud workloads.

Never before has the gap between business expectations and IT capabilities been greater than it is today. The gap between what the business expects and what the IT department can do is widening.

The trends 2022 for Germany

• 82% of IT decision-makers believe there is an “availability gap” in their organization: IT cannot return to production after an outage within service level agreement (SLA) targets.
• 81% of IT decision-makers believe there is a “data protection gap” between the frequency of data backup and the acceptable level of data loss in their organization.

These gaps are most likely due to the increasing number of workloads that are classified as “critical”. However, there is an apparent correlation between the perception of these gaps and the reasons for switching to a different data protection solution, including lower RTOs (availability), shorter RPOs (data protection) and higher reliability.

The gaps perceived by IT decision-makers and why IT leaders are implementing new solutions to reduce data loss and downtime are even better understood when you consider that 40% of all servers (worldwide) fail at least once a year.

The difference between “high priority” data and “normal” data is not as big as a few years ago. There will always be workloads or data deemed more important, but the expectations of those mission-critical workloads and the rest of IT aren’t all that different.

Data Loss

Globally, 56% of “high priority” data and 49% of “normal” data are tolerated for less than one hour of data loss. Companies in Germany say that 59% of their data are “high priority”, and 47% of their “normal” data still accept a data loss of no more than one hour. That means:

• There is not much difference between “high priority” data and other data — all data is important.
• Backups alone are not enough for data protection because they are not performed every hour. Rather, backups must be combined with snapshots and replication.

Understandably, companies have gradually improved the protection of “high priority” data: In 2019, this data was backed up every 205 minutes; in 2021, the frequency was already every 121 minutes. In the same period, companies have significantly reduced the backup interval for their other data: from every 663 minutes (around eight hours or once a day overnight) to 171 minutes (every three hours, i.e. several times a day).

“Normal” data is thus backed up almost as frequently as “high priority” data. These numbers prove that “all data matters” and show that organizations worldwide are increasingly combining backups (usually performed overnight) with snapshots and replication to secure their data.

Downtime

Similar to data loss trends, there is only a 6% difference between “high priority” applications and “normal” applications for acceptable downtime of up to one hour. This also shows that all data is important in everyday business and, unlike in the past, backups should be carried out more than once a day.

Trends for 2022

In the past two years, companies have extensively modernized their IT environments, especially in areas where cloud-based services are possible. This is due to digital transformation initiatives and the accelerated adoption of cloud solutions in the wake of the global pandemic.

The rapid modernization of their production environment has made many companies realize that their data protection is not keeping pace – even though they depend on their data more than ever and dissatisfaction with the status quo has reached record levels. Three important trends can be derived from this for 2022:

• Enterprises will invest more in data protection to protect their modern, often cloud-hosted, productive workloads.
• Reasons for switching to a new data protection solution will primarily be qualitative improvements in terms of reliability, backup frequency and flexible recovery in order to benefit from shorter RPOs and lower RTOs. Key initiatives will include reducing costs and conserving resources, protecting infrastructure (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), container environments, and using the cloud for operational backup and disaster recovery.
• The key to optimizing data protection is the realization that for most companies, it is no longer a question of whether they will be victims of a cyber attack, and particularly a ransomware attack, but rather when. Reliable recovery plays an important role in your strategy to protect against these cyber risks. As a result, organizations have a broad consensus that ransomware is a serious threat and that orchestrated recovery from backups is an important element of a cybersecurity and BC/DR plan.

Now more than ever, companies need to be able to trust that their data is reliably protected and available at all times – in local environments and at branch offices or in the cloud.