More than half or 58% of organisations in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) are looking to change their primary data protection solution to bolster data security an increasingly hybrid infrastructure and guard it against sophisticated cyberattacks.
For one third - approximately 34% of organisations – “improving Reliability/success of backups” is a top priority.
These are key takeaways from APJ-based respondents of the newly-released 2023 Data Protection Trends Report, an annual survey commissioned by Veeam Software. The latest report polled 4,200 unbiased IT leaders and implementers worldwide on a variety of data protection drivers, challenges, and strategies to understand how the data protection market continues to evolve.
Reflecting the global perspective, companies in APJ see a gap between IT capabilities and business needs. Specifically, 84% of respondents in the region have a protection gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and how frequently IT protects their data. Furthermore, 86% have an availability gap between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back.
To plug these holes, the APJ respondents plan to increase their data protection budget by 5.7% in 2023.
Securing data in a hybrid world
The Veeam report reiterated that modern data protection solutions must address the needs of an increasingly hybrid infrastructure where digital assets are stored in physical servers, virtual machines on prem, and in the cloud.
“These solutions must provide equitable capabilities across all three architectures (physical, virtual and cloud). In addition, one should plan for workloads moving across clouds and even back on premises; and again, the data protection strategy should accommodate that fluidity,” said report author Dave Russell, vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam Software.
In APJ, hybrid IT is already the norm with organisations keeping a relatively even balance between servers within the data centre and those that are cloud hosted. Within the data centre, there is a good mix of both physical and virtual servers. This year, organisations in the APJ region reported:
- 29% physical servers within data centers
- 25% virtual machines within data centers
- 46% cloud-hosted server instances
Amid this hybrid IT scenario, it is hardly surprising that more than a third or 37% of APJ organisations are keen to standardise their protection capabilities across their data centre – with IaaS and SaaS workloads as the key driver in their 2023 strategy.
Indeed, among surveyed organisations worldwide, the report showed that the most important attribute of an enterprise backup solution is the protection of IaaS and SaaS for the second year in a row. And more workloads are moved to the cloud, the report cited that assuring reliability is the second most important criteria for organisations globally.
“But when considering that many legacy IT environments may be running legacy backup solutions that were designed for the physical data centre era, those solutions likely run agent-based approaches for protecting cloud workloads, much like they attempted to run agents within VMs during the virtualisation era of the past 15 years,” said Russell.
“Legacy backup mechanisms rarely yield good outcomes when protecting modern workloads; so, one would presume that reliability when protecting modern workloads has suffered. As such, it should come as no surprise that cloud-hosted protection and reliability would be adjacent and top of mind.”
Dave Russell, Veeam Software
And 82% of APJ organisations anticipate using Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to protect at least some of their servers over the next two years, according to the report.
Cyberattacks take their toll on DX initiatives
In the past year, APJ organisations surveyed for the report experience more frequent ransomware attacks, with 45% being hit by two or three attacks in 2022, while 19% having suffered four or more attacks in the same 12-month period.
In recent years, ransomware and the current volatile cyber security landscape have been taking priority for IT teams, causing IT resources and budgets originally allocated towards digital transformation initiatives to pivot to cyber prevention.
In fact, 36% of surveyed organisations in APJ stated that ransomware (including both prevention and remediation) was their biggest hindrance to digital transformation or IT modernisation initiatives, due to its burden on budgets and manpower.
The report also pointed out that as organisations continue their fight against ransomware, IT leaders are focusing on the cyber resiliency plan to align with the increasing importance of consistency and reliability for hybrid cloud data protection and keep businesses running.
“Cyberattacks have become the number one threat to organisations and has forced companies to re-think their data protection strategies. As attacks have become more sophisticated, we see an increasing need to add automation and orchestration to disaster recover processes.”
Dave Russell, Veeam Software
In APJ, the report showed that 35% of respondents want to orchestrate recovery workflows, instead of relying on manual processes. Meanwhile, 23% will leverage on-premises infrastructures for their BC/DR, while 54% will leverage cloud infrastructures for their BC/DR, using IaaS or DRaaS.
“As organisations continue to transform their infrastructure, ensuring support for backup of cloud based workloads, effective usage of backup to the cloud, and ultimately the assurance that backup can support mobility across clouds, there's a need for a solution that makes the complex comprehensive,” said Russell.
Today’s modern IT strategy is hybrid- and multi-cloud, so Veeam delivers purpose-built backup and recovery for the entire enterprise data centre, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google, with native coverage for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads unified for centralised management, licensing and extensive data portability.