Veeam launched its 2024 Data Protection Trends report on January 17th.

For this report, Veeam had a third party interview 1200 IT leaders and implementers accross 10 countries throughout EMA, APJ and the Americas in 2024 – each leading the data protection strategies for their enterprise organization. The data was then compared to the data Veeam has collected on the topics in the report since 2020.

It contains some hidden gems, that data protection admins can benefit from in their daily practices:

Backups still matter in 2024!

Cybersecurity events were the most common and the most impactful cause of outages over the past two years for enterprise organizations. Only 25% of organizations believe they were not hit by a cybersecurity event. More organizations were hit quarterly (26%) than believe were not hit at all (25%).  Ransomware is a 'when', not 'if'. and it will likely be worse than you imagine.

VMs are only 25% of the problem

In 2024 the expected great migration from VMware's vSphere platform to other hypervisors and/or hyperscale platforms may prompt a different approach to backups.

While Veeam sounds synonymous to VM, organizations have to protect more than just virtual machines (VMs). VMs is typically just 25% of the workload that needs to be restorable, and thus require backups. Another half of the problem is cloud-based workloads, and this may shift fast through 2024. If your backup solutions offer backups for vSphere-based VMs, but no support for Hyper-V, or native support for VM-based cloud workloads, an agent may offer some functionality, but not the performance, reliability or ransomware preparedness that native support offers.

74% of enterprise organizations back up Microsoft 365 data

From the interviewed IT leaders, 74% back up using third-party backup product or Backup-as-a-Service solution. This metric is highly skewed because the interviewees work in organizations with 1000+ people. In the small to medium business (SMB) segment, though, that percentage is way lower, as Veeam's previous reports have pointed out. Microsoft's own backup service may shift these numbers in the lower segment, but in the 1000+ people segment they may not put a dent in that percentage.

Recovery test results are in – and sobering…

For enterprise organizations, in Disaster Recovery (DR) tests within the last year, 2 of 5 servers could not be recovered. Furthermore, only 32% of organizations can recover a 50-server site within a business week. Through testing consistently, these gaps can be addressed and recovery service level agreement (SLA) percentage improved.

Of these organizations, luckily, only a mere 1% did not perform a DR test in the past year…

54% of organizations are very likely to change backup solutions in 2024

The likelihood that organizations will switch its primary backup solutions/services within the next twelve months. 17% of interviewees say they definitely will and 37% will likely do so. These organizations are not perfectly happy with their current solution. They may want to switch from on-premises to Software-as-a-Service. On the other side, not every backup solution offers the ransomware resilience or cloud workload backup features that organizations require. At the lower end, some organizations want to improve the reliability and success of backups.