97 Data backup and protection is non-trivial and obviously important to organizations of all sizes, especially as more and more of our information is held online. Backup solution vendor Veeam went a little deeper into the whys and hows of data backup and how it affects current companies and their futures by commissioning an independent survey of 1,550 larger (over 1,000 users) companies across 18 countries. The research shows a continually changing digital transformation occurring as IT practices improve in the area of data protection and backup. Surveyed organizations use a diverse mix of physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud-hosted virtual machines (VMs), while around 10 percent of on-premise data systems will shift to the cloud over the next two years. The agencies surveyed want to make sure that data and the cloud is more available to help improve customer experience and the impact of their brands. “However, the research infers that by modernizing data protection with easy-to-use and flexible solutions,” the researchers wrote, “businesses can greatly increase the protection and usability of their data while also freeing a lot of resources to focus further on their IT modernization and management efforts.” The data provided by IT is the “heart and soul” of modern companies, which makes backup and restoring data a massive concern. Downtime is another issue, with 95 percent of the surveyed organizations experiencing unexpected outages; at least 10 percent of servers have at least one outage of an average two hours once per year. The researchers note, therefore, how important it is to modernize data protection for those inevitable outages. Doing so can help better manage operations, impact customer service, reduce costs and lessen employee task time. There are challenges, of course, to any new changes like modernization of current systems. Some include a lack of IT skills in a company’s workforce, a dependency on legacy systems, and a lack of staff/budget that ultimately prevents them from engaging in this digital transformation. Survey respondents are looking for cloud-based disaster recovery, and the ability to move workloads from on-premise to the cloud. Flexibility of solutions, the researchers conclude, is a big factor in the adoption of new systems and technologies. Data protection, therefore, must be simple, have no delays, and present an immediate return on investment (ROI). It must also be flexible enough to allow for data access from anywhere and at any time. It must continue to be reliable, as well, even as the IT environment evolves. These are the issues companies look for when planning to improve their current backup systems: reliability, reduction in costs, reducing complexity, and improving recovery time. Modernizing your backup into cloud data management (as offered by the study sponsor, Veeam) can cut the cost of data backup and protection by fifty percent. That can lead to a 55 percent increase, says the company, in efficiency as well. It’s of course implausible to expect that organizations will jump directly to a fully modernized backup system; most current mission-critical systems are still tied to legacy solutions, most often located on site. By starting with a hybrid solution, where data is stored both on-premise and in the cloud, managed by a unified toolset, companies are seeing a 49 percent savings on costs, according to the researchers. In addition, as governmental regulation continues to accelerate across the glove, the cost of compliance is rising as well. Moving from ad-hoc or legacy systems to protect and audit data, as companies tend to do now, can result in what the researchers call “isolated pockets of visibility.” These “pockets,” then, can be targeted by cyberattackers. Veeam claims that its own Cloud Data Management system has 17 percent of their customers reporting a reduction in both audit and compliance failure. The system, says Veeam, has also shown 95 percent of organizations dealing with little to no financial impact from attacks like ransomware. Making sure data is reliably backed up and instantly recovered when needed is the challenge of our day. As organizations continue to increase data creation, so must data protection and backup rise to the challenge. Modern systems must be more intelligent, anticipate user needs, and meet user demands. Change is difficult, but the researchers note that organizations must do so as the IT landscape changes, too. When looking to adopt a new IT strategy for both data production and data protection, IT leadership can only benefit from adopting platforms that are automation and cloud-friendly, solving the challenges of today while future-proofing their systems for tomorrow.