Across EMEA, 74% of companies have brought their workloads back to their on-premises data centres. One of the reasons cited is that of having a fallback in the event there is a need for disaster recovery.
By Chris Norton, regional director for Africa at Veeam Software
This is according to the Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, which highlighted how the ‘journey to the cloud’ does not necessarily translate to a one direction approach only. Given the rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, there is a growing sense that South African companies will rethink their cloud approaches to better prepare for rapid recovery in the event of potential ransomware and other cyberattacks in 2023.
Predictions of protracted rolling blackouts well into 2023 and an uptick in ransomware attacks over the past several months, mean local businesses will have agility and resilience in mind as they plan for the year ahead. For IT leaders, the keywords will be ‘protection’ and ‘recovery.’ In fact, the Veeam report has revealed that 81% of organisations in the EMEA region anticipate having to look at cloud-based data protection in 2023.
It is not a surprise that Modern Data Protection strategies have evolved. Most organisations are delegating backup responsibilities to specialists, instead of requiring each workload owner, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), to protect their own data. This has resulted in most backups of cloud workloads now being done by the backup team and no longer requiring the specialised expertise or added burden of cloud administrators.
Binning traditional views
Some PaaS administrators still incorrectly presume that the native durability of cloud-hosted services mean there is no need for backup. More than a third (34%) of companies do not yet back up their cloud-hosted file shares, and 15% do not back up their cloud-hosted databases.
One of the reasons for this can be found in the early days of most production ‘as a Service’ journeys. Many companies assumed that server resilience or built-in ‘undo’ functions would negate the need for backup. This was especially true when it came to the use of Microsoft 365. But today, only 4% of companies in EMEA rely solely on the Microsoft 365 recycle bin or similar undo capabilities, and (thankfully) only 3% incorrectly believe that Microsoft 365’s resilience negates the need for backup.
Another common misunderstanding between application owners and backup admins are the myriad reasons for doing data protection. While application owners may be primarily concerned with uptime and only relatively recent rollback, backup admins tend to focus on compliance mandates, cyber, and other disasters.
Backing up as a service
The Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023 suggests that 2023 will see businesses in EMEA will leverage Backup-as-a-Services (BaaS) to gain operational and economic efficiencies as well as assuring data survivability from disasters and ransomware attacks.
Already, nearly every company surveyed in EMEA (98%) claims to use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy, though that varies from cloud storage as a repository to full-fledged BaaS or Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) services.
With the prevalence of ransomware such that it’s now a question of how often, rather than if or when, an attack will happen, it remains even more critical for businesses that they are resilient, and to be confident their data is protected and always available, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud. A Modern Data Protection strategy is fundamental as we head into 2023 to ensure corporate apps and data are protected from ransomware, disaster, and harmful actors, and are always available.
For those firms that still see these issues as belonging to IT only, perhaps 2023 is the year to put it on the board’s agenda too. If a criminal thinks data is valuable enough to steal, surely it is valuable enough to protect?