Veeam Software, a leader in Modern Data Protection, has released findings of the company’s fourth annual Data Protection Trends Report to better understand how data protection is evolving in a digital world.
The report shows that data backup budgets will continue to rise to align with the increasing importance of consistency and reliability for hybrid cloud data protection as organisations continue their fight against ransomware.
Reliability and consistency (of protecting IaaS and SaaS alongside data centre servers) are the key drivers for improving data protection in 2023. For organisations that are struggling to protect cloud-hosted data with legacy backup solutions, it is likely they will supplement their data centre backup solution with IaaS/PaaS and/or SaaS capabilities.
“IT leaders are facing a dual challenge. They are building and supporting increasingly complex hybrid environments, while the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks is increasing,” said Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. “Legacy backup approaches won’t address modern workloads – from IaaS and SaaS to containers – and result in an unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it’s needed most. This is what’s focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan. They need Modern Data Protection.”
The report provides regional data for the Middle East and Africa market. Some of the regional top-level findings include:
Protection and availability gap in the MEA region
- 78% have an ‘availability gap’ between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back
- 79% have a ‘protection gap’ between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data
Ransomware in the MEA region
Ransomware attacks continue to be more frequent
- Only 14% experienced no ransomware attacks in 2022
- 18% experienced only one attack
- 48% experienced two or three attacks
- And 21% experienced four or more attacks in 2022
- 45% of organisations stated that ransomware (including both prevention and remediation) was their biggest hindrance to Digital Transformation or IT modernisation initiatives, due to its burden on budgets and manpower
- When organisations were asked about their most significant attacks suffered in 2022:
- 39% of their entire production data set was successfully encrypted or destroyed
- Only 55% of the encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable
Mohamad Rizk, Regional Director, Middle East and CIS at Veeam, said: “The fundamental principles of how to prepare defences against even the most sophisticated and powerful ransomware stay relatively the same. The first is the practice of impeccable digital hygiene. All employees must be trained to identify suspicious content and be warned of the impact that malpractice using work devices can lead to. Secondly, all businesses must prepare for their defences to fail. Concepts such as Zero Trust and deploying techniques such as two-factor authentication can be useful for restricting the access an attacker has to data. The best way to protect data is to ensure that it has been securely backed up and is fully recoverable before an incident takes place with the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule – there should always be at least three copies of data, on at least two different types of media, at least one off-site and one immutable or offline, with zero unverified backups or errors.”
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) initiatives in the MEA region
- Every facet of IT continues to be a candidate for cloudification, with data protection being a common scenario.
- 84% of the Middle East and Africa organisations anticipate using Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to protect at least some of their servers over the next two years
- That said, cloud-based storage is not misunderstood as the ‘tape killer’ that early pundits tried to sell it as. When discussing the media used within their backup systems, the Middle East and Africa organisations reported that in addition to disk-based protection:
- 64% of production data is stored in a cloud at some point in its lifecycle
- 52% of production data is stored on a tape at some point in its lifecycle
- 86% of organisations consider their cyber and (traditional) BC/DR initiatives to be either mostly or completely integrated. To achieve that among organisations in the Middle East and Africa:
- 41% want to orchestrate recovery workflows, instead of relying on manual processes
- 25% will leverage on-premises infrastructures for their BC/DR
- 41% will leverage cloud infrastructures for their BC/DR, using IaaS or DRaaS
