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Report: Cloud Services Mostly Used for Data Protection

Most organizations have turned to the many cloud services to protect their data, according to a  survey commissioned by Veeam Software.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was used by "98 percent of organizations" as part of their "data protection strategy," according to Veeam's newly published "Cloud Protection Trends for 2023" report. The report surveyed "1,700 unbiased IT leaders from 7 countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand)," as conducted sometime this fall by an unnamed "third-party research firm" for Veeam.

Veeam, a provider of backup, recovery and data management services, had commissioned the survey to better understand organizational perspectives on cloud services use, according to four categories. It surveyed opinions on "Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (BaaS/DRaaS)."

On the IaaS side, 88 percent of respondents surprisingly indicated that their organization had "brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center." There were various reasons cited for these retractions, including switching cloud service providers, plus "performance and cost considerations."

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) users reported PaaS use for "foundational IT scenarios, such as file shares or databases." Veeam's report just cited AWS and Microsoft Azure use in that regard, namely:

  • 76% run file services within cloud-hosted servers and 56% run managed file shares from AWS or Microsoft Azure
  • 78% run databases within cloud-hosted servers and 65% run managed databases from AWS or Microsoft Azure.

Backup as a service (BaaS) was used by 58 percent of the organizations, per the survey results. However, organizations still used tape backups:

It is notable that BaaS is no longer seen as the "tape killer" that early pundits offered, with organizations stating that nearly 50% of their data is still stored on tape during its lifecycle, regardless of their use of cloud-based data protection services.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) use stats weren't described, but the considerations for DRaaS use included "improving regulatory compliance, reducing complexity and freeing up IT resources."

For its software as a service (SaaS) data, the survey focused on Microsoft 365 data backups. Only "1 in 9 (11%) organizations do not protect their Microsoft 365 data" with backups. Most respondents (89 percent) used "third-party backups/BaaS or enhanced tiers of Microsoft 365 for legal hold, or both."

Additionally, the survey found that "61% of M365 backups are done by backup specialists versus 39% by M365 administrators."

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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