IT leaders are worried about the security they currently have in place to defend against cyberattacks, but are willing to splash the cash to boost their protections, new research has claimed.
The fourth annual Veeam Data Protection Trends Report surveyed over 4,000 IT leaders and those involved with implementing cybersecurity strategies at various organizations, finding that the adoption of hybrid working has contributed to this feeling of unease.
It noted how new challenges are arising with the increasing shift of digital infrastructure away from premises, as organizations look to cloud document storage and cloud hosting providers, forcing them to raise their IT budgets in response.
'Gaps' to be filled
In setting goals for the rest of this year, the survey found that IT leaders wanted to prioritize their backup implementations, as well as making sure that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are just as secure as their datacenter workloads.
As for the organizations themselves, a vast majority felt there was a gap in what they wanted and what their IT teams could deliver. More specifically, there was an 'availability gap' felt by 82% between the requested and actual speeds of recovering stored data.
Nearly 80% of organizations also complained about a 'protection gap', with the amount of potential data loss being too great for the frequency at which data was protected by IT departments.
Such gaps are the reason why over half of the organizations surveyed wished to change their protection for this year, and serve as the justification for increased data protection spending too, expected on average to be up by 8.3% for 85% of organizations, which is considerably higher than in other areas of IT spending.
Judging by recent years, such protection is sorely needed. Cyberattacks, especially ransomware, were the biggest disrupters for organizations' systems every year since 2020, with over 80% professing to have been attacked at least once in the last year, up by a huge 76% from Veeam's previous report.
Data recovery was of the utmost importance to them, as only 55% of stolen data was able to be salvaged. Organizations highlighted “integration of data protection within a cyber preparedness strategy” as the main focus for protection solutions.
A corollary of ransomware attacks, in addition to their initial damage, is the drain they have on the resources and budgets of IT teams, forcing them to postpone upgrades to the digital landscape of the organization and focus on recovery efforts and the fallout from such attacks instead.
Containers such as Kubernettes are also growing in popularity - just over half of respondents are running them, and 40% said they planned to. But the report lamented the fact that the "same kinds of data protection strategy disparities as seen in early adopters of SaaS five years ago or virtualization 15 years ago" are being repeated.
The issue is that only the storage is being protected, whilst an overarching approach to protecting workloads is being neglected. The report noted this is typical behavior following the adoption of new platforms.
"Legacy backup approaches won’t address modern workloads - from IaaS and SaaS to containers - and result in an unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it’s needed most", said Veeam CTO Danny Allan.
"This is what’s focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan. They need Modern Data Protection."
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