Trends in data protection.

Veeam released their 2023 Data Protection Trends report this morning, which surveyed 4,200 IT professionals on data protection drivers, challenges, and strategies.

The IT environment.

Hybrid IT remains common, balancing physical servers in data centers and cloud-hosted servers. Organizations report 28% of their physical servers within data centers, 25% as virtual machines within data centers, and 47% hosted in the cloud. 35% of organizations report a focus on standardization of their data center, IaaS, and SaaS loads in 2023. IT leaders have a growing belief that they are underprotected to threats, with 82% reporting an availability gap, or a difference in the time needed by professionals  to recover software, and the amount of time it actually takes for IT teams to recover systems.

Facing ransomware.

Ransomware was a pervasive issue that is anticipated to continue steadily into 2023. Only 15% of respondents did not fall victim to ransomware last year, whereas 18% were victimized in a single ransomware attack in 2022, 48% saw two or three attacks, and 18% reported four or more attacks within the year. 41% of those surveyed report ransomware as the most problematic in reference to Digital Transformation and IT initiatives, with strains on finances and staffing demanded in the instance of ransomware.

IT security is increasingly cloud security.

Cloud dependence continues to grow, with 80% anticipating the use of Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for server protection over the next two years. On top of disk-based protection, 63% of production data is stored in a cloud at some point in its lifecycle, with 50% stored on a tape at some point in its lifetime.