IT companies saw a change in working models and expansion strategies in the last few years. As the pace of these changes continues to rise, companies’ budget for data backup and protection is also expected to increase. In a survey by Veeam, over 1,000 employees from 28 different countries expected their organization’s budget for data protection to increase by 5.9% globally in 2022. With the acceleration of cloud initiatives, it is expected that in 2022 there will be significant investments in data protection owing to the diverse production environments. Read on to know about the data protection trends for 2022.
The ‘Hybrid’ working model
Reports say that the hybrid working model will continue to stay and require on-premises servers and cloud-hosted servers on a 50-50 basis. Employees who participated in the survey from the Asia-Pacific regions gave an estimate of the server distribution in their organizations as 26% physical servers, 24% virtual, and 50% cloud-hosted. The report says that 68% of organizations use cloud services for their Data Protection strategy.
The widening ‘gap’
With the changing working models of organizations, their IT security teams have come under more workload. As a result, there is a widening gap between what business units expect and what IT can deliver.
As per the survey conducted for 2022 among the IT leaders in the Asia Pacific
- 93% believe that their organizations have an “availability gap” between the SLAs expected and how quickly IT can return to productivity.
- 91% believe their organizations have a “protection gap” between how much data they can afford to lose and how often data is protected.
All data matters
Some data are deemed to be of higher importance. however, there is not much difference between high-priority and normal data. According to the survey among organizations in the Asia Pacific, 53% of high-priority and 48% of normal data have a data tolerance of hour or less. This indicates that there is not much difference between high-priority data and everything else and all data matters.
Organizations improved their high-priority data protection from every 205 minutes in 2019 to 121 minutes in 2021. They have also improved the protection of the rest of their data from every 663 minutes to 171 minutes.
Reports indicate that there is only a 6% variance between the tolerable downtime of high-priority and normal applications for up to one hour. Therefore, there is a need for better data protection solutions than the traditional once-per-day backups.
Data protection trends for 2022
The previous two years have witnessed accelerated cloud adoption and rapid modernization of production. The continuing digital transformation has led to organizations realizing that their data protection has not modernized at the same rate. According to the report, this has indicated three major data protection trends for 2022:
- There will be an increased investment for data protection to protect the modern, and often cloud-hosted, workloads that are already in production.
- Drivers for change will focus on qualitative improvement in reliability, protection frequency, and agile recoveries. Other key initiatives will include better economic value and consumption, protecting IaaS/SaaS/containers, and leveraging the cloud for operational backups and disaster recovery.
- Organizations have recognized that ransomware is a disaster and improving data protection is a must for preparing against cyberattacks. Having a reliable data recovery solution will be part of an organization’s cyber-preparedness strategy.
Source credit: 2022 Top trends in data protection
Also read: 84% of IT leaders optimistic about their cybersecurity readiness: Confluera Cloud Research 2022
