Veeam recently published the latest and largest research report on data protection, as surveyed by an independent research firm with nearly 3,400 responses from 28 countries. If that was big – this is bigger: 8,000 responses between the DPR 2020, DPR 2021, and now the DPR 2022 reports.

For each of the three research reports, respondents in enterprise organizations (> 1,000 employees) were asked what percentage of their servers were:

• Physical servers, not including virtualization hosts, within a data center
• Virtual machines within a virtualization host within a data center
• Cloud-hosted servers within either a Managed Service Provider or a hyperscale (e.g. Amazon, Azure, Google) cloud

Then, they were asked what they anticipated the percentage to be two years from now. When you interleave the three datasets, you get a massive trendline from 2020, 2021, 2022, as well as what was anticipated by 2023 and what is expected by 2024. To see the trendline for 8,000 organizations and their hybrid strategies, check out this 4-minute video:

Candidly, as former industry analysts (from Gartner and ESG respectively), Dave and I have rarely seen such a large data sampling on a pragmatic IT strategy question – especially with the “shape” (trend) of the data being reported so consistently across three large and separate data sets. This teaches a few key truths for 2022:

1. The data center is not dead nor dying. There are as many good reasons to run a workload on premises as there are to run workloads on the cloud.
2. Your data protection strategy needs to accommodate physical, virtual and multiple cloud-hosted options.

Veeam sponsors research at this scale to ensure that we truly understand not just the macro IT trends but also how customer goals and challenges may differ across geographies, organization size, or specific industry/vertical markets. It is gratifying to see so many organizations recognize that “hybrid” and “multi” cloud are “the new normal” for organizations of nearly every size and locale.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that Veeam Backup & Replication v11A delivers on a consistent approach to protecting not only physical and virtual servers, but also .

We hope these first two topics have been helpful. This post is the first part of a multi-part series, so please stay tuned to the Veeam blog:

• Part 1: What is driving change & what are organizations looking for moving forward
• Part 2: What do Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud architectures look like and how does that affect your data protection strategy
• Part 3: What does ‘Enterprise’ backup mean in 2022
• Part 4: Why do we still have so much downtime in 2022 and what is the value of data
• Part 5: What does BC/DR look like in 2022

Please reach out to Dave (@BackupDave) or I (@JBuff) to tell us how this research aligns with your organization’s data protection goals for 2022 — and don’t forget to download the full report.

Click here to download the full Data Protection Trends 2022 report.