Many businesses are set to spend big to raise their security game
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IT leaders are concerned about the security they currently have to defend against cyberattacks, but are willing to spend money to improve their protection, new research shows.
The fourth annual Veeam Data protection trend report (opens in new tab) surveyed more than 4,000 IT leaders and those involved in implementing cybersecurity strategies across organizations, and found that the adoption of hybrid working has contributed to this sense of unease.
It noted how new challenges are emerging with the increasing shift of digital infrastructure away from buildings, as organizations look to cloud document storage and cloud hosting providers, forcing them to increase their IT budgets.
‘Gaps’ are filled
In setting goals for the remainder of this year, the survey found that IT leaders wanted to prioritize their backup deployments and ensure that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are just as secure are like their data center workloads.
As for the organizations themselves, the vast majority felt there was a gap in what they wanted and what their IT teams could deliver. More specifically, there was an “availability gap” felt by 82% between the requested and actual speed of restoring saved data.
Nearly 80% of organizations also complained of a “protection gap,” where the amount of potential data loss was too great for the frequency with which data was protected by IT departments.
Such gaps are why more than half of organizations surveyed want to change their protections for this year, and also serve as justification for increased data protection spending, which is expected to increase by an average of 8.3% for 85% of organizations , which is significantly higher than other areas of IT spending.
Judging by recent years, such protection is badly needed. Cyber-attacks, especially ransomware, have been the biggest disruptions to organizations’ systems each year since 2020, with over 80% claiming to have been attacked at least once in the past year, a massive 76% increase from Veeam’s previous report .
Data recovery was paramount to them as only 55% of stolen data could be recovered. Organizations highlighted “integrating data protection into a cyber-preparedness strategy” as the main focus for security solutions.
A corollary of ransomware attacks, beyond their initial damage, is the drain on IT teams’ resources and budgets, forcing them to postpone upgrades to the organization’s digital landscape and focus on recovery efforts and the consequences of such attacks. instead.
Containers such as Kubernettes are also growing in popularity, with just over half of respondents using them and 40% saying they plan to. But the report lamented that “the same kinds of differences in data protection strategy as early adopters of SaaS five years ago or virtualization 15 years ago” are repeated.
The problem is that only storage is protected, while an overarching approach to protecting workloads is neglected. The report noted that this is typical behavior following the adoption of new platforms.
“Legacy backup approaches are ill-suited for modern workloads – from IaaS and SaaS to containers – and result in unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it is most needed,” said Veeam CTO Danny Allan.
“This is what’s on the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resilience plan. They need modern data protection.”