Spending on digital transformation is expected to approach $7.4 trillion between 2020 and 2023, according to global market intelligence firm IDC. Yet the latest industry data recently released from Veeam Software reveals that close to half of businesses worldwide are being hampered in their transformation journeys. The big culprits? Legacy technologies and lack of IT skills.

The Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report surveyed more than 1,500 global enterprises to understand their current approach to data protection and management, as well as how they expect to be prepared for the IT challenges of the future.

In a press statement earlier this month, Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of Product Strategy at Veeam said, “technology is constantly moving forward, continually changing, and transforming how we do business — especially in these current times as we’re all working in new ways.”

“Due to DX (digital transformation), it’s important to always look at the ever-changing IT landscape to see where businesses stand on their solutions, challenges, and goals.”

“It’s great to see the global drive to embrace technology to deliver a richer user experience, however, the Achilles Heel still seems to be how to protect and manage data across the hybrid cloud,” he adds.

“Data protection must move beyond outdated legacy solutions to a higher state of intelligence and be able to anticipate needs and meet evolving demands. Based on our data, unless business leaders recognize that — and act on it — real transformation just won’t happen.”

Out of those surveyed by Veeam, 40 percent of organisations reported they still rely on legacy systems to protect their data without recognising the negative effect this can have on their business.

Another big issue was downtime. The majority (905 percent) of businesses stated that they suffer unexpected outages, which typically last about 117 minutes (almost two hours). To explain in simpler terms, businesses consider 51 percent of their data to be “High Priority,” as opposed to “Normal.” An hour of downtime from a High Priority application is might cost $67,651, and $61,642 for a Normal application.

Additionally, almost every company surveyed admitted to experiencing downtime, with 10 percent of servers having unexpected outages every year, which suggests a dire need to modernize data protection to enable digital transformation.

Half of organisations recognise that the cloud plays a critical role in today’s data protection strategy, and will likely increase in importance as time goes on.

The most essential aspects of a modern data protection strategy outlined in this report all hinge upon the use of cloud-based capabilities:

• The ability to do disaster recovery via a cloud service (54 percent);
• The ability to move workloads from one cloud to another (48 percent), and
• The ability to move workloads from on-prem to the cloud (50 percent).

Further highlights from the Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report include:

• The biggest challenge that will impact businesses within the next year: cyber threats (32 percent). Other challenges were a shortage of skills to implement technology and meeting changing customer needs.
• The most impactful current challenge organisations are dealing with: lack of staff to work on new initiatives (42 percent).
• 51 percent of respondants believe digital transformation can help their business change customer service.
• 39 percent of respondents saw the ability to improve the reliability of backups as the most likely reason to drive their organisation to change its primary backup solution.
• 43 percent of businesses plan to leverage cloud-based backup managed by a Backup as a Service provider within the next two years.

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