Multi-cloud Data Management Could Replace Dysfunctional Backup and Recovery Systems by 2025
In the past 12 months, an IDC survey found that 93% of businesses suffered at least one data-related cybersecurity incident.
Zerto’s whitepaper, titled The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness: 2022, delves into the ever-changing needs of businesses for data protection and recovery from cyberattacks, their consequences, and the way organizations are dealing with and prioritizing to be future-ready.
A recent survey found that 79% of organizations have had to dig into disaster recovery plans in the past 12 months due to ransomware and other cyberattacks. Conducted by IDC, the survey findings are available in the whitepaper by Zerto, named The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness: 2022.
The HP-owned company said organizations faced 19.3 attacks on average, 2.3 of which were ransomware incidents. Ransomware gangs are usually financially motivated, and their attacks are 2.5x more likely to result in a disaster than a natural disaster (hardware and software failures). The data-driven nature of present-day businesses tends to be an attractive prospect for threat actors keen to exploit any weaknesses to disrupt normal business operations.
Data availability and access are thus crucial factors influencing an organization’s uptime which is usually protected through interleaved data protection solutions such as backup and recovery software, snapshots, mirrors, and replicas.
However, Zerto points out that the proliferation of data in recent years coincides with increasing complexity from using newer applications at the core, in the cloud, and at the edge. 80% of new applications will be deployed in the cloud or at the edge. This data, which may be structured, unstructured, or containerized, is geographically dispersed in AWS S3 and Azure Blob and other storage services, making it complex.
The result? In the past 12 months, 93% of respondents said their businesses were disrupted in a data-related incident, while 68% said they suffered four or more such disruptions. 83% of responses indicated that at least one attack caused data corruption and 60% of respondents said their data was unrecoverable. This is 43% higher than a year ago.
Surprisingly, malware isn’t the biggest reason why data becomes unrecoverable, though it is a close second. The reasons for unrecoverable data are:
Source: Zerto, IDC
The fact the respondents lack confidence in their current backup and data recovery solutions doesn’t help either. Just 28% of survey respondents said they are 100% confident that their backup system will recover data, and a mere 29% are convinced that their data recovery solution will successfully retrieve data.
See More: How Zero-Trust is Transforming Data Protection
The biggest challenges in data backup and recovery are:
Source: Zerto, IDC
The overall consequences of data disruptions to businesses are employee overtime (45%), recovery costs (~42%), loss of employee productivity (40%), direct loss of revenue (~37%), unrecoverable data (~34%), minor damage to company reputation (~32%), significant damage to company reputation (~27%), and permanent loss of customers (22%).
To mitigate this,
- 16% of respondents expect significant additional investment
- 20% expect moderate additional investment
- 22% expect small additional investment
- 41% don’t expect an increase
Phil Goodwin, research vice president at IDC, said, “Modernizing data protection, including backup and data recovery, is a high priority for many IT organizations. Cloud (i.e., hybrid cloud backup and archiving) and investment in cloud-based DR (DRaaS) are key ways in which organizations intend to modernize their data protection.”
A cloud-centric data protection strategy will be adopted by 55% of organizations by 2025. The top priorities are cloud-native apps, hybrid cloud backup and hybrid cloud archives.
“With many new applications being deployed at the core, cloud, and edge, IT organizations are facing ever-increasing complexity in providing data protection and data recovery,” Goodwin added. “The industry is responding to these needs with multi cloud data management solutions that provide integrated backup, DR, recovery orchestration, policy management, and SLA tracking.”
Caroline Seymour, VP of product marketing at Zerto, concluded, “In particular, continuous data protection (CDP) is delivering the capabilities needed to drive shorter recoveries, and we expect it to play a key role as organizations drive closer and closer to SLAs requiring zero downtime with zero data loss.”
Note: IDC’s whitepaper is based on a survey commissioned by Zerto of 509 respondents working across medium- to large-scale organizations from North America (70%), Western Europe (30%) involved in manufacturing (14%), financial services (13%), retail (13%) and information technology (13%) and others. 70% of respondents are IT leaders, whereas 30% are business leaders.
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