IT leaders feel increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats

As businesses adopt more complex hybrid IT environments and raise budgets to fend off cyberattacks, as well as keep up with production environments diversifying across various clouds, a new study finds that IT leaders increasingly feel they aren't sufficiently protected.

The latest Data protection Trends Report from data protection specialist Veeam Software shows that a top priority of organizations this year is improving reliability and success of backups, followed by ensuring that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) protection is equal to the protection they rely on for datacenter-centric workloads.

The study shows four out of five organizations believe that they have a gap, or a sense of dissatisfaction or anxiety, between what their business units expect and what IT services can deliver. 82 percent say they have an 'availability gap' between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. While 79 percent cite a 'protection gap' between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data.

Globally, organizations expect to increase their data protection budget in 2023 by 6.5 percent, which is notably higher than overall spending plans in other areas of IT. Of the 85 percent of organizations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3 percent and this is often in concert with increased investments in cybersecurity tools.

Cyberattacks continue to be a worry, 85 percent of organizations say they were attacked at least once in the past 12 months; up from 76 percent in last year’s report. Recovery is a major concern as organizations report that only 55 percent of their encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable from attacks.

Containers are also becoming a focus for protection. 52 percent of respondents are currently running containers, while 40 percent of organizations are planning to deploy containers -- and yet, most organizations are merely protecting the underlying storage, instead of protecting the workloads themselves. As new production platforms enter the mainstream there’s a recognition that legacy protection methods are insufficient, thereby creating an opportunity for third-party backup tools to ensure comprehensive protection.

"IT leaders are facing a dual challenge. They are building and supporting increasingly complex hybrid environments, while the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks is increasing," says Danny Allan, CTO and senior vice president of product strategy at Veeam. "This is a major concern as leaders think through how they mitigate and recover business operations from any type of disruption. 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. This is what's focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan. They need Modern Data Protection."

The full report is available from the Veeam site.

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