Are Data Protection Budgets Growing Enough?

The corporate response to the pandemic has become a massive proof of concept for technology – with organizations being forced to make direct digital investments that generally would have been spread over several years. However, increasing technology budgets are a long-term trend rather than a short-term solution. This reflects that businesses focus on building more resilient ecosystems and markets. 

This pattern will continue as ventures become defter and future-confirmation their plans of action against computerized disturbance. Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 shows that enterprises face a data protection emergency. The number of organizations failing to protect data is on the rise. While this partly explains why data protection budgets exceed overall IT spending, are they increasing enough to protect business continuity fully?

IT Was Spending, And Platform Diversity Will Increase

On average, according to current Veeam research, IT leaders expect their organization’s data protection budget to increase by approximately 6%. While estimates vary, Gartner’s most recent global IT spending forecast estimates growth at around 5% from 2021 to 2022 – citing other expectations for the digital marketplace to thrive.

From these predictions, we can draw at least two conclusions: first, the growth of data protection, as one would expect, continues to ride the wave of mass digitization and cloud acceleration; if one grows, the other must too. Secondly, companies are playing hide and seek on the subject of data protection. 

While 6% may not seem like a significant increase over 5%, every 1% equals billions of dollars in real terms. So, There are two answers to this question. The first is that organizations can only protect some data. According to our research, 86% of EMEA businesses have a “security gap” between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and how often it is backed up.

The second answer is more complicated because it involves an examination of causality. Businesses find protecting their data more challenging than ever. The reasons for this phenomenon are manifold. The significant problem is that the platforms businesses store and use data are changing, which means that the necessary data protection solutions, protocols and required skills are also changing. 

Regarding platform diversity, we are charging into a new normal for modern IT with a 50/50 split between on-premises and cloud-hosted servers. Inside the server farm, there is a steady assumption for both physical and virtual stages. At the same time, within the cloud, there is a healthy mix of hyper-scaled and managed service provider-hosted infrastructures (MSP). The two key findings of these trends are that the data center is still alive and ready to be. There are still as many valid justifications to run a responsibility on-premises as in the cloud. Additionally, data protection strategies must accommodate physical, virtual, and multiple cloud-hosted options and increasingly popular Kubernetes environments.

Data Protection Meets SaaS

One of the drivers of the accelerated use of cloud services is the trend of organizations using apps as services. The ongoing explosion of Software as a Service (SaaS) changes how organizations protect data. One such nuance is the fear that IT admins will assume that SaaS apps come with native Backup and recovery solutions that meet the standards of a modern data protection strategy.

An excellent example of where such an assumption can prove costly is when using Microsoft O365. While the built-in data protection capabilities reassure businesses that most O365 data is backed up and protected, the only real solution is a backup done by a third party.

The second impact that the transition to SaaS has on data protection strategies is their increase and the following protection. The amount of data is ever-increasing, and the cloud’s acceleration further facilitates this trend. This partly explains why the number of companies that experienced a data protection gap in the past 12 months has increased by 14%. To keep the hole from widening further, enterprises need scalable data protection solutions to keep up with growing volumes. The fix to that is cloud-based Backup.

Two-thirds of EMEA businesses currently use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy, and this will increase over the next 12 months. Additionally, IT leaders ranked the ability to protect workloads hosted in the cloud as the top buying factor for enterprise data protection in 2022. To sum up, organizations increasingly rely on the cloud, planning to implement data protection measures such as Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Back to the main question: Are data protection budgets growing enough? The more diplomatic answer is that, to date, there is still a lot of ground to recover. 

Exponentially increasing volumes of data mean there is more of it to protect, while the growing diversity of platforms means data protection strategies are gaining in complexity. Their budget will likely continue to outpace their overall IT spending as companies gradually look to close the gap between how much data they can afford to lose and how much they can adequately protect. Of course, there are other solutions to the problem than spending more.

Most modern solutions leverage cloud-based Backup and recovery to improve the economics of data protection at scale – meaning businesses can back up for less. Hence, organizations are advised to work with an experienced partner to develop an adequate data protection strategy that delivers a business continuity solution within an appropriate budget.

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