2019 Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey: 3 Key Takeaways

by Dave Wallen on September 5, 2019

Since 2015, Unitrends, a leading all-in-one enterprise backup solution provider, has conducted their annual Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey to gauge the state of data backup across a wide range of organizations. What makes this survey insightful is not only that the respondents span 400 organizations of various sizes and industry types, but also that it holds the data of the past 4 years, thus making it easier to map trends and draw fact-based conclusions. Here are some of the major takeaways from this year’s survey report, Growing Usage of SaaS Data Protection – Unitrends 2019 Survey.

Click the image above for a direct PDF download of the report.

The Ugly: Data Loss and Downtime Continue to Plague Organizations

Organizations are still grappling with data loss and the resultant break in business continuity. Consistently, over the past four years, 30% of respondents reported losing data as the result of a data center outage.

The Bad: It’s on You to Protect Your Data, and That Includes SaaS Data

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The responsibility to protect and recover your data is a shared one, even with best-in-class cloud programs. SaaS providers such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google practice a “shared responsibility” model when it comes to SaaS data protection. While their products are highly secure and offer an SLA uptime of 99.9%, the customer is responsible for data loss at their end, whether malicious or otherwise. And then, there is also the extremely rare, but possible downtime. All of which make data protection a business priority.

The Good: Usage of Reliable, Cost-effective and Easy Cloud Backup and Recovery is Increasing

The silver lining is that SaaS backup is on the rise. The increase in cloud-based backups has grown at 10% (CAGR) from 2016 to 2019, and this growth is consistent across industries of all sizes. Enterprises are recognizing the financial and operational advantages of SaaS apps. As an IT Manager at a large manufacturer in Singapore said, “Cloud backup and storage saves on hardware costs, and it’s very efficient.”

Additionally, the realization that SaaS data needs backup is also increasing. For the first time in the survey, protecting SaaS applications with cloud-based backup was one of the top 5 cloud-based data protection technologies. What is promising about this insight is that as the usage of cloud-based data protection and recovery tools are more extensively used, the rate of data loss and its impact on business continuity should begin to subside.