Technology becomes obsolete with time and the latest 2020 Veeam Data Protection Trends Report indicates a rising tide of change as 44% of global organizations are being hindered in their digital transformation journeys due to unreliable, legacy technologies.

Fear not slow migrators, legacy technologies are not obsolete – yet. 

Veeam specializes in backup and disaster recovery and has been ranked a leader in backup and data recovery in Gartner's Magic Quadrant chart for three consecutive years.

The company surveyed over 1,500 global enterprises to understand the problems that IT organizations are struggling with right now, their aspirations moving forward around IT modernization and digital transformation, and how enterprises are prioritizing data protection and backup. 

Digital transformation spending is expected to approach $7.4 trillion between 2020 and 2023 as organizations are eager to leave their legacy systems in the dust for the promise of greater efficiencies and insights that cloud deployments have to offer, according to IDC research cited in the Veeam report.

Survey respondents were asked why they wanted to change data protection technologies and the No. 1 driver for change "by a longshot" was the improved reliability of backups, Jason Buffington, VP of solutions strategy at Veeam, told SDxCentral.

“Which I think is both interesting and damning in 2020 – they just want it to work. It's not about a feature, it's not about a button or a workload or anything else, they just want what they bought to work,” Buffington said.

Enterprises also cited the desire to cut costs and reduce complexity for better outcomes around speed and agility as top macro trends. 

Data Protection

Data continues to eat the world, making the systems an organization chooses to invest in all the more important. As these services become the very foundation of the business, it can ultimately determine an organization's success or failure in today's market. 

Sounds dramatic? Perhaps. But 40% of organizations said they still rely on legacy systems to protect their data without realizing the negative impact it can have on their business. The result: 95% of organizations reported suffering unexpected outages that lasted for an average of almost two hours, according to the report. 

To put this into perspective, respondents consider 51% of their data as “high priority” versus “normal.” As cited in the findings, one hour of downtime from a high priority application is estimated to cost $67,651, and $61,642 for a normal application. 

Downtime is money-grubber in any capacity. 

If data goes unprotected it cannot maintain availability and recoverability. This is one of the biggest challenges organizations with legacy technology are facing right now, said Dave Russell, VP of enterprise at Veeam.

Part of the challenge, Russell explained, falls on the increasing number of complex environments, on-premises workloads, virtualization, and container adoption.

The ability to improve reliability of backups factors heavily in an organization's decision to change its primary backup solution, according to 39% of the respondents surveyed. Reduced software and hardware costs got the top nod from 38% and 33% pointed to a greater return on investment.

“Long story short, it's the landscape, or a broadening horizontal nature of workloads, and the effect of having to manage many things without other things sunsetting or completely going away,” Russell explained. 

Among the organizations surveyed, 43% plan to use cloud-based backup services within the next two years.

Meanwhile, enterprises are going through the motions of awareness, gaining clarity on their data dependency and seeking out more efficient ways to ensure continued access to that data, Buffington said.

Impediments to Digital Transformation

The chief IT challenge in 2020 will be security threats, according to 32% of respondents, followed by a skill shortage, according to 30% of the participants in Veeam's survey. The report's authors called that "an alarming number given the challenge of cyberthreats."

Those concerns aren't unfounded, especially considering how many enterprises that delayed moving to the cloud are now scrambling to reset and execute a full transformation quickly.

Appropriate training and the ability to implement technology are paramount in a business’ digital transformation and necessary for protection against malicious attacks, according to the report. 

“If you grew up in the data center, you grew up with ‘how do I secure brick and mortar?,’ and now you’re trying to stand data up in the cloud so users stay productive,” explained Buffington.

“Most organizations don't realize that when you’re moving from on-premise data centers, where there's a variety of mature technologies, and you're moving production workloads into clouds like virtual machines (VMs) running in Microsoft Azure and AWS, they don't have native backup,” he said. 

As organizations move to host their workloads in cloud environments they still have to secure robust backup because "many of the traditional data center centric backup tools do not have the capability to do so,” Buffington added. 

Managed Services Will Rise

Various cloud services will also gain traction among enterprises that are seeking the benefits of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service(PaaS) amid a skills gap in the workforce, Russell said.

Survey respondents, when asked to define cloud-based capabilities they deem necessary to meet modern data protection challenges, cited disaster recovery via a cloud service at 54%, the ability to move workloads from on-premises to the cloud at 50%, and the ability to move workloads from one cloud to another at 48%.

Those findings should facilitate a rise in managed service provider activity, particularly in enterprises that lack the resources or talent to meet their objectives, Russell explained.

“If the thesis is correct, what we're going through right now is going to accelerate a move towards embracing services,” he said. "My hope would be that the onus is still on the organization to leverage the managed service provider as a resource, as a subject matter expert, and they themselves, meaning the organization, should try to simultaneously in parallel, come up to speed and get educated themselves."