Enterprises change their backup approach to deal with cloud risks

Companies are increasingly recognizing the increasing need to protect their SaaS environments, with almost 90 percent of Microsoft 365 customers now using supplemental measures rather than relying solely on built-in recovery capabilities.

The latest study from data protection specialist Veeam finds 98 percent of organizations use a cloud-hosted infrastructure like Backup-as-a-Service or Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service as part of their data protection strategy.

However, a worrying 34 percent of organizations don't yet back up their cloud-hosted file shares, 15 percent don't back up their cloud-hosted databases and 11 percent don't protect their Microsoft 365 data.

"The growing adoption of cloud-powered tools and services, escalated by the massive shift to remote work and current hybrid work environments, put a spotlight on hybrid IT and data protection strategies across industries," says Danny Allan, CTO and senior vice president of product strategy at Veeam. "As cybersecurity threats continue to increase, organizations must look beyond traditional backup services and build a purposeful approach that best suits their business needs and cloud strategy. This survey shows that workloads continue to fluidly move from data centers to clouds and back again, as well as from one cloud to another -- creating even more complexity in data protection strategy. The results of this survey show that while modern IT enterprises have made significant strides in cloud and data protection, there is still work to be done."

The report shows businesses are increasingly interested in outsourcing their backups and gaining a 'turnkey' level of management service instead of having internal IT staff continuing to manage BaaS-delivered infrastructure. This shift suggests that experience and trust in providers is increasing and could also point to challenges over the past year with recruiting IT talent.

Interestingly though, while new IT workloads are launching in the cloud at far faster rates than old workloads are being decommissioned in data centers, a surprising 88 percent say they have brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center for one or more reasons, including development, cost/performance optimization and disaster recovery.

You can get the full report from the Veeam site.

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