Data protection challenges are undermining organizations’ abilities to execute Digital Transformation (DX) initiatives globally, according to the Veeam Data Protection Report 2021, which has found that 58% of backups fail, leaving data unprotected.
The report also found that against the backdrop of COVID-19 and ensuing economic uncertainty, which 40% of CXOs cite as the biggest threat to their organization’s DX in the next 12 months, inadequate data protection and the challenges to business continuity posed by the pandemic are hindering organizations’ initiatives to transform.
“Over the past 12 months, CXOs across the globe have faced a unique set of challenges around how to ensure data remains protected in a highly diverse, operational landscape,” says Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam.
“In response to the pandemic, we have seen organizations accelerate DX initiatives by years and months in order to stay in business. However, the way data is managed and protected continues to undermine them. Businesses are being held back by legacy IT and outdated data protection capabilities, as well as the time and money invested in responding to the most urgent challenges posed by COVID-19. Until these inadequacies are addressed, genuine transformation will continue to evade organisations.”
Why Urgent Action on Data Protection is Required
The report revealed organisations’ data protection capabilities are unable to keep pace with the DX demands, posing a threat to business continuity, potentially leading to severe consequences for both business reputation and performance.
Despite the integral role backup plays in modern data protection, 14% of all data is not backed up at all and 58% of recoveries fail, leaving businesses’ data unprotected and irretrievable in the event of an outage by cyberattack.
Furthermore, unexpected outages are common, with 95% of organizations experiencing them in the last 12 months; and with one in four servers having at least one unexpected outage in the prior year, the impact of downtime and data loss is experienced all too frequently.
Crucially, businesses are seeing this hit their bottom line, with more than half of CXOs saying this can lead to a loss of confidence towards their organization from customers, employees, and stakeholders.
“There are two main reasons for the lack of backup and restore success: Backups are ending with errors or are overrunning the allocated backup window, and secondly, restorations are failing to deliver their required SLAs,“ says Allan.
“Simply put, if a backup fails, the data remains unprotected, which is a huge concern for businesses given that the impacts of data loss and unplanned downtime span from customer backlash to reduced corporate share prices. Further compounding this challenge is the fact that the digital threat landscape is evolving at an exponential rate.”
“The result is an unquestionable gap between the data protection capabilities of businesses versus their DX needs. It is urgent that this shortfall is addressed given the pressure on organizations to accelerate their use of cloud-based technologies to serve customers in the digital economy.”
