A new report from Veeam reveals how many organisations are not sufficiently prepared for effective data protection and management. This points to an urgent need to modernise data protection and focus on Business Continuity to enable Digital Transformation.
As organisations look to transform their business operations and revolutionise customer service, Digital Transformation (DX) is at the top of most CXO’s agendas; in fact, DX spending is expected to approach US$7.4 trillion between 2020 and 2023, a CAGR of 17.5%.
However, according to the latest industry data released from Veeam Software, a leader in backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management, almost half of global organisations are being hindered in their DX journeys due to unreliable, legacy technologies with 44% citing lack of IT skills or expertise as another barrier to success.
Moreover, almost every company admitted to experiencing downtime, with one out of every 10 servers having unexpected outages each year – problems that last for hours and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – and this points to an urgent need to modernise data protection and focus on Business Continuity to enable DX.
The Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report surveyed more than 1,500 global enterprises to understand their approach toward data protection and management and how they expect to be prepared for the IT challenges they face, including reacting to demand changes and interruptions in service, as well as more aspirational goals of IT modernisation and DX.
“Technology is constantly moving forward, continually changing and transforming how we do business – especially in these current times as we’re all working in new ways. Due to DX, it’s important to always look at the ever-changing IT landscape to see where businesses stand on their solutions, challenges and goals,” said Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of Product Strategy at Veeam.
“It’s great to see the global drive to embrace technology to deliver a richer user experience, however the Achilles Heel still seems to be how to protect and manage data across the hybrid cloud. Data protection must move beyond outdated legacy solutions to a higher state of intelligence and be able to anticipate needs and meet evolving demands. Based on our data, unless business leaders recognise that – and act on it – real transformation just won’t happen.”
The criticality of data protection and availability
Respondents stated that data delivered through IT has become the heart and soul of most organisations, so it should not be a surprise how important ‘data protection’ has become within IT teams, including not just backing up and restoring data, but also extending business capabilities.
However, many organisations (40%) still rely on legacy systems to protect their data without fully appreciating the negative impact this can have on their business. The vast majority (95%) of organisations suffer unexpected outages and on average, an outage lasts 117 minutes (almost two hours).
Putting this into context, organisations consider 51% of their data as ‘high priority’ versus ‘normal’. An hour of downtime from a high priority application is estimated to cost US$67,651, while this number is US$61,642 for a normal application. With such a balance between high priority and normal in percentages and impact costs, it’s clear that ‘all data matters’ and that downtime is intolerable anywhere within today’s environments.
“Data protection is more important than ever now to help organisations continue to meet their operational IT demands while also aspiring towards DX and IT modernisation. Data is now spread across data centres and clouds through file shares, shared storage and even SaaS-based platforms. Legacy tools designed to back up on-premises file shares and applications cannot succeed in the hybrid/multi-cloud world and are costing companies time and resources while also putting their data at risk,” added Allan.
DX and the cloud
Enterprises know they must continue to make progress with their IT modernisation and DX initiatives in order to meet new industry challenges and according to this report’s feedback, the most defining aspects of a modern data protection strategy all hinge upon utilisation of various cloud-based capabilities: Organisations’ ability to do Disaster Recovery (DR) via a cloud service (54%), the ability to move workloads from on-premises to cloud follows (50%) and the ability to move workloads from one cloud to another (48%).
