Veeam is an expert in developing backup, disaster recovery and intelligent data management software for virtual, physical and multi-cloud infrastructures. As part of its mission to stay at the forefront of the industry, the company surveyed 1,550 global enterprises in an effort to understand their approaches towards data protection and management. It also wanted to learn how organisations prepared for changes and challenges to the market plus what their views were on IT modernisation and Digital Transformation.

The organisations already possessed diverse infrastructure: 38% used on-premises servers, 30% used Virtual Machines and 32% used cloud-based VMs. 10% of on-prem infrastructure was expected to shift to cloud over the next two years.

Top-line findings included that 73% of companies were unable to meet demands for uninterrupted workload access, with 95% having suffered unexpected outages that averaged over two hours. Furthermore, one out of every 10 VMs experienced issues — problems that lasted for hours and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, downtime and maintenance.

However, cost was not considered to be the highest impact of downtime. Lost and vulnerable data damaged organizations’ reputations plus relationships with customers and employees: 44% said downtime had damaged their brand and integrity and 51% claimed to have suffered a loss of customer confidence due to outages.

Veeam subsequently re-ran the survey with 500 of its registered customers. These organisations stated that Veeam helped reduce the restoration time of business-critical workloads by 86% and reduced their average total data protection spend by 49% annually. Employee unproductivity (caused by data loss) dropped by 82%.

The survey also showed more than 80% of organizations are in the process or planning for Digital Transformation but many face challenges in achieving their desired results. The biggest hurdles were a lack of IT staff skills (44%) and dependency on legacy systems (40%).

These days, data and applications aren’t constrained to a single server. Data is now spread across data centres and clouds through file shares, shared storage and SaaS-based platforms. Legacy tools designed to back up on-premises file shares and applications cannot succeed in the hybrid/multi-cloud world and are costing companies time and resources while also putting their data at risk.

Data has grown into a key element for every digital business and so the solutions must grow with it. Legacy tools are an outdated answer to yesterday’s challenges. Modern data protection must be more intelligent and able to anticipate needs and meet demands. Ensuring reliable backup, instant recovery and reuse of data requires an evolution in how data is managed, leveraging intelligence to enable data to back up autonomously, migrate to the right location based on business needs and secure itself from anomalous activity.

Veeam’s surveys underscore the notion that software should be simple, flexible and reliable. If adding a new NAS device or cloud storage requires you to change your data protection routine and spend time re-educating IT staff, you’re doing it wrong.

Data that isn’t flexible can’t take part in the rapid adoption of cloud services. Without the cloud, organizations are limited in how fast they can move. Veeam’s hybrid cloud solutions help make data free and fluid across any cloud without any hardware, software or licensing barriers. It also rapidly automates protection, security and compliance reporting to enable the return of tied up costs and resources back to the business.

The result is well-protected data that can be leveraged across a hybrid environment. This gives you the ability to accelerate your business and its Digital Transformation by ensuring the availability and integrity of your critical data.

To see the whole report and learn how business and IT leaders addressed these issues from shared insights, click here to download it.