Posted by Hybrid IT environments have become one of the key aspects of modern-day IT strategy that most CIOs and IT leaders have adopted in their enterprises and organisations in recent years. Data control, cost-effectiveness and lean but responsive IT teams are among the core benefits that the hybrid IT approach brings to the table for organisations.
But there’s also an element of complexity that often gets overlooked due to the benefits that hybrid IT offers. And it wouldn’t be wrong to say that complex hybrid IT environments make IT leaders and CIOs nervous to an extent. Besides the benefits, complex hybrid IT environments bring security and other challenges as well for them.
Complex Hybrid IT Environments
In fact, companies are challenged with more complex hybrid IT environments revealed new commissioned survey findings from software company Veeam. To deal with this scenario, the survey found that organisations are increasing budgets to avert cyberattacks and protect their production environments and diversify across various clouds.
Data Protection Budget
Globally, organisations expect to raise their data protection budget by 6.5 % in 2023, which as per the study findings is quite higher compared to overall spending plans in other areas of IT.
Of the 85% of organisations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3% and often in concert with increased investments in cybersecurity tools, the study stated.
Cyberattacks
While that’s on the expected spending on data protection this year, cyberattacks during the past three years – 2020, 2021and 2022 have caused the most impactful outages for organisations. As per the Veeam study, 85% of organisations were attacked at least once in the past 12 months, which is 10% more than last year’s report.
Dual Challenge for IT Leaders
Given this scenario, the survey of 4,200 IT leaders and implementors globally across all sizes of organisations found that “IT leaders feel they aren’t sufficiently protected.”
That simply means complex hybrid IT environments are no less than any challenge for IT leaders. “IT leaders are facing a dual challenge,” says Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of Product Strategy – Veeam.
“They are building and supporting increasingly complex hybrid environments, while the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks is increasing,” Allan explains why a complex hybrid IT environment is a dual challenge for IT leaders.
Certainly, the complexity of hybrid IT environments not only are prone to cyber incidents but technical glitches could lead to disruptions for businesses and organisations. “This is a major concern as leaders think through how they mitigate and recover business operations from any type of disruption,” notes Allan.
Gap in Organisations
Four out of five organisations believe that they have a gap, or a sense of dissatisfaction or anxiety, between what their business units expect and what IT services can deliver.
While 82% of organisations have an ‘availability gap’ between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. 79% cite a ‘protection gap’ between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data.
These gaps are one reason that 57% of organisations expect to change their primary data protection in 2023, as well as the justification for increased data protection budgets.
“Legacy backup approaches won’t address modern workloads – from IaaS and SaaS to containers – and result in an unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it’s needed most,” says Allan.
“This is what’s focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan. They need Modern Data Protection.” observes Allan.
A top priority of organisations this year is improving the reliability and success of backups, followed by ensuring that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) protection is equitable to the protection they rely on for data centre-centric workloads.