A leading provider of data protection and ransomware recovery solutions by market share, releases the results of its fifth annual report.
While companies say they will spend more money to defend against cyberattacks, the survey also found that IT leaders feel even less protected and are more concerned about their ability to recover business-critical data. Cyberattacks remain the leading cause of outages, and the data shows that while organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud for major recoveries, only a small percentage believe they have the ability to resolve even a small crisis in less than one to get through the week.
Findings from the 2024 Veeam Data Protection Trends Report
- Cyber attacks are the main cause of outages: For the fourth year in a row, cyberattacks are the most common and serious cause of business failure in companies. The fact that other types of failures follow closely behind - infrastructure/networks, storage hardware, application software, public cloud resources and server hardware - highlights the growing need for modernized backup strategies.
- Ransomware is still an “if” and not an “if”: 76 percent of companies have been attacked at least once in the last 12 months. While that number is down from 85 percent in 2023, 26 percent said they were attacked at least four times last year. According to the report, the number of companies that were attacked quarterly was higher than the number that believe they were not attacked at all. Recovery remains a major problem, with only 13 percent of organizations reporting they could successfully recover in a disaster recovery situation.
- Digital transformation is hindered by cyberattacks: The survey found that protecting against cyber threats and addressing environmental, social and government goals are the biggest barriers to IT modernization and digital transformation initiatives. Factors cited were ranked higher than the usual issues related to expertise and manpower, economic concerns and organizational issues. This is due to the amount of effort and resources diverted from investing in digital transformation or IT modernization.
- Only 32 percent of companies believe they can recover from a small attack, crisis or outage within a week: While most organizations view cyber resilience as a fundamental aspect of their broader business continuity or disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy, BC/DR preparation does not yet meet most SLA expectations. When asked how long it would take IT to restore 50 servers, only 32 percent believed their IT staff could restore the servers within five business days. Other statistics reflect the growing gap between business expectations for data security and what IT services can deliver. When asked about their last large-scale cyber/disaster test, fewer than 3 in 5 (58 percent) servers were recoverable within expectations.
- Budgets for data security are increasing at an ever-increasing rate: Data security budgets are expected to increase by 2024 percent by 6,6. This is the second year in a row that the survey found data security spending growth will outpace IT spending growth.[1] Overall, 92 percent of organizations expect to spend more on data security in 2024 to guard against cyberattacks and the changing manufacturing landscape that requires different approaches to data security.
- Data security and IT security are becoming increasingly integrated: For the second year in a row, respondents believe the most common and important aspect of a modern data protection solution is integration with cybersecurity tools. Two in five respondents (41 percent) consider some aspect of mobility in cloud scenarios to be the most important feature of a modern solution, including the ability to move a workload from one cloud to another and standardizing the protection of on-premises workloads Context of IaaS/SaaS.
“Ransomware remains the number one threat to business continuity,” said Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam. “It is currently the leading cause of outages and the ongoing need to protect is hindering digital transformation efforts. But even though organizations are increasing their spending on protection, less than a third believe they can recover quickly from a small attack. The results of this year's Veeam Data Protection Trends Report underscore the imperative of continued cyber vigilance and the importance for every organization to ensure they have the right backup and recovery capabilities in place. That’s why Veeam’s mission in 2024 is to keep businesses running.”
Further key statements
- Most companies use containers, However, they do not completely secure them: The use of containers continues to increase: 59 percent of companies use them in production, another 37 percent are either introducing them or planning to do so. Unfortunately, only 25 percent of companies use a backup solution designed specifically for containers, while the rest of companies only back up some of the underlying components - such as storage repositories or the database contents. However, neither tactic ensures that applications and services can resume after a crisis or even a simple import/configuration error that needs to be reverted.
- There will be significant workplace changes in 2024 outside the company: The fact that 47 percent of respondents expressed the intention to seek a new job outside of their current company within the next twelve months presents both a challenge and an opportunity for data security initiatives Data security talent represents a significant disadvantage for companies, especially when crises are unavoidable at the same time. But the resulting market shift presents an opportunity to add knowledge to protect modern production workloads residing in clouds such as Microsoft 365, Kubernetes containers, or other IaaS/PaaS implementations.
- Hybrid production architectures forcing a rethink of the term “backup”: For the second year in a row, the top two considerations for enterprise backup solutions are reliability and protection of cloud-hosted workloads (IaaS and SaaS). This is problematic for organizations that rely on legacy, data center-centric data protection solutions. As organizations move workloads from one platform or cloud to another, IT teams that rely on legacy data protection solutions that do not provide adequate protection for cloud-hosted workloads will struggle to maintain SLAs, especially when using cloud-native offerings such as Use Microsoft 365/Salesforce (SaaS) or containers
About Veeam Veeam offers companies resiliency through data security, data recovery and data freedom for their hybrid cloud. Veeam Data Platform offers a single solution for cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS and Kubernetes environments, giving businesses the confidence that their applications and data are protected and always available to keep their businesses running.