Almost half of global firms are being hindered in their digital transformation (DX) initiatives due to unreliable, legacy technologies with 44% citing lack of IT skills or expertise as another barrier to success,” according to Veeam Software.
This is based on Veeam’s 2020 Data Protection Trends report, which involved a survey by Vanson Bourne of 1,550 decision-makers conducted earlier this year.
The respondents were based in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Middle East, Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Findings show that almost every company admitted to experiencing downtime, with one out of every 10 servers having unexpected outages each year — problems that last for hours and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This points to an urgent need to modernise data protection and focus on business continuity to enable DX.
“The Achilles Heel still seems to be how to protect and manage data across the hybrid cloud,” said Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of product strategy at Veeam. “Data protection must move beyond outdated legacy solutions to a higher state of intelligence and be able to anticipate needs and meet evolving demands.”
However, 40% of firms surveyed still rely on legacy systems to protect their data without fully appreciating the negative impact this can have on their business. The vast majority (95%) of organisations suffer unexpected outages and on average, an outage lasts 117 minutes or almost two hours.
Companies consider 51% of their data as “high priority” versus “normal,” and an hour of downtime from a high-priority application is estimated to cost $67,651, and for a normal application costs $61,642.
“Data is now spread across data centres and clouds through file shares, shared storage, and even SaaS-based platforms,” said Allan. “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.”
According to respondents, a modern data protection strategy hinges upon the use of various cloud-based capabilities — organisations’ ability to do disaster recovery via a cloud service (54%), the ability to move workloads from on-premises to cloud follows (50%), and the ability to move workloads from one cloud to another (48%).
