In one survey, 98% of respondents using cloud services were still using other forms of backups to protect their cloud environment

A fall 2022 survey of 1,700 IT leaders from 7 countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand) regarding their use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions in both production and protection scenarios has found that respondents had recognized the increasing need to protect their SaaS environments.

For example, nearly 90% of Microsoft 365 customers surveyed had used supplemental measures rather than relying solely on built-in recovery capabilities. The top reason cited was “preparing for a rapid recovery from cyber and ransomware attacks”, followed by “regulatory compliance”. The survey data showed respondents delegating backup responsibilities to backup specialists instead of requiring each workload (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) owner to protect their own data. Another finding was that 34% of respondents did not back up their cloud-hosted file shares, and 15% did not back up their cloud-hosted databases.

Other findings

For IaaS:

    1. 30% of cloud-hosted workloads in the survey were from “cloud first” strategies, whereby new workloads started in clouds at far faster rates than old workloads were being decommissioned in the data center.
    2. 98% of respondents utilized a cloud-hosted infrastructure as part of their data protection strategy, including cloud-storage tiers, cloud-infrastructure as their disaster recovery site, or the use of Backup-as-a-Service/Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service providers.
    3. 88% of respondents brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center for one or more reasons (development, cost/performance optimization, or disaster recovery) to ensure consistent protection and the ability to migrate from data center to cloud, cloud to data center, or from one cloud to another cloud.

For PaaS:

    1. 76% of respondents ran file services within cloud-hosted servers and 56% ran managed file shares from AWS or Microsoft Azure.
    2. 78% ran databases within cloud-hosted servers and 65% ran managed databases from AWS or Microsoft Azure.

For BaaS/DRaaS:

    1. 58% of respondents utilized managed backup (BaaS) compared to the 42% that utilized cloud storage as part of their self-managed data protection solution. Also, 48% started with self-managed cloud storage but eventually switched to BaaS.
    2. 98% of respondents claimed to use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy, although that varied from cloud storage as a repository to full-fledged BaaS or DRaaS services.
    3. Nearly 50% of respondents’ data were still stored on tape, regardless of their use of cloud-based backup services.

Said Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy, Veeam, which commissioned the survey: “As cybersecurity threats continue to increase, organizations must look beyond traditional backup services and build a purposeful approach that best suits their business needs and cloud strategy. The results of this survey show that while modern IT enterprises have made significant strides in cloud and data protection, there is still work to be done.”