Veeam is proud to release the findings of yet another research project, the 2023 Data Protection Trends Report, which is the industry’s largest independent research on backup and data protection. This research is fully independent, representing the whole market, and not only from Veeam customers, and was conducted by a third-party research organization, with no one knowing that Veeam was involved.

Below we see data on the causality of unplanned outages over the last three years. Just looking at the percentages, for all causes, the total adds up to almost 500%, meaning that on average over the last three years, there have been five different causes of unplanned outages. Further, the number and variety of causes is why backup still matters in 2023, as bad things still happen in the data center, and in cloud environments. For the most recent year, Cybersecurity events are tied for the most common (along with Application software outage), but Cyber is the most impact cause of an outage.

Sadly, as an industry, we are not making progress in the fight against ransomware. Year over year, research from the two largest ever independent reports on data protection show that:

• The number of organizations reporting that they suffered no cyberattacks declined from 24% to 15%.
• In the last two years, the two most frequent numbers of successful attacks were two and three times in the last twelve months.
• However, the total of two and three attacks rose from 42% to 49% this year, meaning half of organizations globally can expect at least two or three cyber events.

In a cyber event, the amount of production data affected, and the amount of data that can be successfully recovered, are also concerning.

Data affected by the most significant cyber event:

• The average percentage of the organization’s production data that was encrypted or destroyed was 39%.
• However, 26% reported that they lost 61% or more of their production data due to an attack.
• Note that this is data from a single event, but that most (67%) of organizations suffered two or more events, which collectively further increases the amount of data that was lost.

Looking at cyber recovery:

• On average, 55% of the data was able to be recovered (noting that this is an industry survey, not of Veeam customers).
• This means that on average, an organization will lose 18% of their data from the single most significant ransomware event each year. 39% of the production data was encrypted or destroyed, and during recovery attempts, 45% of that encrypted or destroyed data was never successfully restored (39% * 45% = 18%).
• It is unlikely that any organization has 18% of data that they can lose, especially in a single event. Noting that 16% (approximately one-out-of-six organizations) responded that they could only recover 20% or less of their data.

Note: If you are interested in cyber resiliency and ransomware, we encourage you to download another Veeam research report, 2022 Ransomware Trends. Veeam commissioned this report utilizing an independent research firm, which surveyed 1,000 unbiased IT leaders in the spring of 2022, including CISOs, security pros, backup admins and IT operations across nine countries in the Americas, EMEA and APJ — all of whom had experienced at least one cyberattack in 2021.

We hope to connect with you on our LinkedIn Live sessions where we will discuss this and other fascinating results from this research, and remember to download the full report at 2023 Data Protection Trends Report.

If you have questions about this, or any of Veeam’s many other research projects, feel free to contact us at StrategicResearch@veeam.com.

About the 2023 Data Protection Report: Veeam’s Data Protection Report is the latest and largest research report on data protection ever in the history of backup and availability, as surveyed by an independent research firm with 4,200 responses from 28 countries. Download the full 2023 Data Protection Trends Report to get access to all the latest data protection insights. Want to learn more about enterprise backup solutions at Veeam? Visit the Veeam Enterprise Backup Solutions Page.