84% of enterprises in MEA to use BaaS or DRaaS over next two years, says Veeam Research

Veeam^® Software, a leader in Modern Data Protection, today released findings of the company’s fourth annual Data Protection Trends Report to better understand how data protection is evolving in a digital world. The survey found that companies are challenged with more complex hybrid IT environments and are raising budgets to fend off cyberattacks as well as keep up as production environments continue to diversify across various clouds. The result is that IT leaders feel they aren’t sufficiently protected. 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 equitable to the protection they rely on for datacenter-centric workloads.

Notable insights from the report include:

• Reliability and consistency (of protecting IaaS and SaaS alongside datacenter servers) are the key drivers for improving data protection in 2023. For organizations that are struggling to protect cloud-hosted data with legacy backup solutions, it is likely they will supplement their data center backup solution with IaaS/PaaS and/or SaaS capabilities.
• Ransomware is both the most common and most impactful cause of outages, alongside natural disasters (fire, flood, etc.) and user errors (overwrites, deletion, etc.). Organizations should implement backup and recovery solutions that support a holistic approach to data protection, and that can integrate with other cyber detection and remediation technologies to ensure comprehensive cyber resilience.
• Cloud-based services seem nearly inevitable for organizations of all sizes. But similar to how there isn’t just one type of production cloud, there isn’t just one protection cloud scenario. Organizations should consider cloud tiers for retention, Backup as a Service (BaaS) and ultimately, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

“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,” said 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 survey of 4,200 unbiased IT leaders and implementers included 368 in Middle East & Africa (MEA). Below are interesting findings from the region:

Protection and Availability Gap in the MEA region

• 78% have an “Availability Gap” between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back
• 79% have a “Protection Gap” between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data

“To be fully transformative, enterprises in Middle East & Africa need to optimize every dollar of their IT budgets and make sure the right workloads and applications are prioritized and protected, and a simple, flexible, reliable and powerful modern data protection solution is in place – one that protects all environments – Cloud, Virtual, Physical, SaaS and Kubernetes. Only then can enterprises ensure they’re sufficiently protected and ready for turbulent times ahead,” says Mohamad Rizk, Regional Director, Middle East & CIS at Veeam.

Ransomware in the MEA region

Ransomware attacks continue to be more frequent

• Only 14% experienced no ransomware attacks in 2022
• 18% experienced only one attack
• 48% experienced two or three attacks
• And 21% experienced four or more attacks in 2022
• 45% of organizations stated that ransomware (including both prevention and remediation) was their biggest hindrance to Digital Transformation or IT modernization initiatives, due to its burden on budgets and manpower
• When organizations were asked about their most significant attacks suffered in 2022:
  • 39% of their entire production data set was successfully encrypted or destroyed
  • Only 55% of the encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable

“Without secure, trusted backups, organizations risk data loss and increase the possibility of a ransom payment. To avoid these worst-case scenarios, the speed of data recovery is critical, which is why Veeam provides the fastest recovery options in the industry, allowing enterprises to get back to normal business operations without reintroducing threats into the environment. Veeam also has the people to help with every step of the way, including onboarding services, account management, and a specialized ransomware SWAT team to assist in the event of a ransomware attack,” says Rizk.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) initiatives in the MEA region

• Every facet of IT continues to be candidates for cloudification, with data protection being a common scenario.
  • 84% of the Middle East & Africa organizations anticipate using Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to protect at least some of their servers over the next two years.
• That said, cloud-based storage is not misunderstood as the “tape killer” that early pundits tried to sell it as. When discussing the media used within their backup systems, the Middle East & Africa organizations reported that in addition to disk-based protection:
  • 64% of production data is stored in a cloud at some point in its lifecycle
  • 52% of production data is stored on a tape at some point in its lifecycle
• 86% organizations consider their cyber and (traditional) BC/DR initiatives to be either mostly or completely integrated. To achieve that among organizations in the Middle East & Africa:
  • 41% want to orchestrate recovery workflows, instead of relying on manual processes
  • 25% will leverage on-premises infrastructures for their BC/DR
  • 41% will leverage cloud infrastructures for their BC/DR, using IaaS or DRaaS

“It is no surprise that BaaS and DRaaS is becoming so popular among regional organizations. They provide viable alternatives to managing everything. It can be more cost-effective to outsource backup and disaster recovery needs instead of hiring and training in-house resources. A BaaS provider can ensure backups are not only successful, but regularly tested and restorable. A DRaaS provider can support with as little as an off-site replication or fully manage your complete disaster recovery plan from testing and execution to failing over and failing back, should an unplanned event occur,” continues Rizk.

“Veeam understands these changing market dynamics and data protection needs of enterprises today. From critical workloads running on-premises to the sprawl of data in the cloud and at home offices, Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS service provider partners offer the off‑site backup, monitoring and management, and disaster recovery services organizations need to stay resilient in the face of any threat.”