Trends in cloud protection.

Veeam has released its 2023 Cloud Protection Trends Report yesterday, detailing 1,700 IT leaders’ use of cloud services in production and protection scenarios.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

According to earlier research, about half of all production server workloads are cloud-hosted, and 30% of cloud workloads were created in the cloud, rather than being migrated from datacenters. 98% of organizations were found to use cloud-hosted infrastructure as part of their data protection strategy. 88% of enterprises have moved cloud-hosted work back to datacenters or other clouds. 63% of backups are being done by backup teams, as opposed to cloud-based admins.

Platform as-a-Service.

63% of companies are running file services within VMs that are running in Amazon/Azure, while 50% are running file shares natively from those clouds. 61% of organizations run databases within VMs running in Azure/Amazon, and about 40% are running either AzureSQL, Amazon RDS, or others. 34% of enterprises do not back up their cloud-hosted file shares, and 15% are not backing up their cloud-hosted databases.

Software as-a-Service.

11% of companies don’t back up their Microsoft 365 data, relying on “undo” and the recycling bin. The other 89% use either third-party backups or enhanced tiers of Microsoft 365. 61% of backups are performed by backup specialists, as opposed to 39% of Microsoft 365 admins.

Backup/Disaster Recovery as-a-Service.

Managed backup, or Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), is used by 58% of enterprises utilizing IaaS/SaaS in production, versus 42% using self-managed cloud storage. Only 30% of organizations chose either BaaS or cloud storage at the beginning and stuck with it, as opposed to 70% choosing and switching later. 48% started with self-managed cloud storage and switched to BaaS, whereas 22% did the opposite. Almost half of organizations say that they plan to handle backups themselves, which is a decrease from 63% last year.