Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2024 finds cyber-attacks the #1 cause of business outages

Veeam Software, the #1 leader by market share in Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, recently released insights from the company’s fifth annual Veeam Data Protection Trends Report.

While companies say they will spend more trying to fend off cyber-attacks, the survey found IT leaders are feeling even less protected and more concerned about their ability to recover and restore mission-critical data. Respondents shared that cyber-attacks remain the top cause of outages and that while organisations are putting more emphasis on utilising the cloud for major recoveries, only a small percentage believe they’d be able to recover from even a small crisis in under a week.

Highlights of the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2024:

“Ransomware continues to be the biggest threat to business continuity”, said Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam. “It’s the number one cause of outages today, and protecting against it is hampering digital transformation efforts. Furthermore, although companies are increasing their spend on protection, less than a third of companies believe they can recover quickly from a small attack. The findings in this year’s Veeam Data Protection Trends Report highlight the need for continued cyber vigilance, and the importance of every organisation to ensure they have the right protection and recovery capabilities. It’s why Veeam’s mission in 2024 is to keep businesses running”.

Other notable insights from the report include:

• Most Organisations Are Using Containers But Not Backing Them All Up: Container usage continues to rise, with 59% of enterprises running them in production, and another 37% either rolling them out or planning to. Unfortunately, only 25% of organisations use a backup solution that is purpose-built for containers, while the rest of organisations back up only some of the underlying components – e.g., storage repositories or the database contents. Neither tactic ensures that the applications and services will be resumable after a crisis, or even a simple import/configuration error that needs to be undone.
• 2024 Will See Significant Job Changes Outside the Organisation: The fact that 47% of respondents expressed an intent to seek a new job outside of their current organisation within the next twelve months represents both a challenge and an opportunity for data protection initiatives. While losing valuable data protection talent puts organizations at a significant disadvantage when crises inevitably strike, the market shift presents an opportunity to add knowledge to protect modern production workloads that reside in clouds, such as Microsoft 365, Kubernetes containers, or other IaaS/PaaS deployments.
• Hybrid Production Architectures are Forcing Reconsideration of ‘Backup’: For the second straight year, the two most important considerations for “enterprise backup” solutions are reliability and the protection of cloud-hosted workloads (IaaS and SaaS). This is problematic for organisations relying on older datacentre-centric data protection solutions. As organisations move workloads from one platform or cloud to another, IT teams relying on legacy backup solutions that do not offer equitable protection of cloud-hosted workloads will struggle to maintain SLAs, particularly those that embrace cloud-native offerings like Microsoft 365/Salesforce (SaaS) or containers.

“The report shows that the sophisticated and ever-evolving cyber-threat landscape is impeding digital transformation initiatives that leadership teams are accountable for, and which are critical to the success of organisations today. With ransomware attacks on the rise in the Middle East, most organisations now consider cyber-resiliency (CR) as a foundational aspect of their broader business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy. Unfortunately, BC/DR preparedness is not yet ‘passing’ most SLA expectations. As organizations move workloads from one platform or cloud to another, IT teams are still relying on legacy backup solutions that do not offer equitable protection of cloud-hosted workloads. Here, increasing data protection budgets is only one part of the puzzle. The other part is investing budgets into data protection solutions that offer radical resilience through data security, data recovery, and data freedom purpose-built for today’s hybrid cloud demands”, Mohamad Rizk, Regional Director, Middle East & CIS at Veeam.

[1] Gartner Forecast Alert: IT Spending, Worldwide, 2Q23 Update; Published: 06 September 2023 ID: G00795167; Analyst(s): John-David Lovelock, Linglan Wang