By Dave Russell
While organizations of all sizes now embrace hybrid-cloud architectures, it is not a one-way journey to the cloud that reduces the importance of the modern data center. According to Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023, 88% of organizations brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center for one or more reasons including development, cost/performance optimization, or disaster recovery.
Here are the top Cloud predictions for 2023.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
While organizations of all sizes now embrace hybrid-cloud architectures, it is not a one-way journey to the cloud that reduces the importance of the modern data center. According to the report, 88% of organizations brought workloads from the cloud back to their data center for one or more reasons including development, cost/performance optimization, or disaster recovery.
The trend around fluid movement between multi-hybrid cloud storage strategies has escalated especially considering the growing adoption of cloud-powered tools and services. Based on this multi-faceted approach, organizations have reached a point where long-term retention is playing a larger role in IT strategy. It is an especially sensitive point involving data protection specific to data loss prevention.
This highlights a need for 2023 data protection strategies to ensure consistent protection and the ability to migrate, as workloads move from the data center to cloud, cloud to the data center, or from one cloud to another cloud.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
There are multiple reasons why the majority of organizations are backing up their M365 data. As data protection strategies have evolved and ransomware continues to be a top concern, most organizations are delegating backup responsibilities to backup specialists, instead of requiring each workload (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) owner to protect their own data. The CPT report revealed that a promising majority of 89% use third-party backups/BaaS or enhanced tiers of Microsoft 365 for legal hold, or both. This fuels the progression of backup becoming a conventional component tasked to the traditional backup admin versus the application team. More important, these use cases are reaching beyond the traditional backup and long-term retention scenarios.
Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (BaaS/DRaaS)
While there are many notions around what Backup as a Service means to organizations, most consider it as running through the cloud or as a service with an MSP in order to improve operational efficiencies. For DRaaS, it is more so on gaining expertise. For a more concise interpretation, BaaS is noted as extending further on tactical improvements, and DRaaS is more purposeful to the business in generating strategic benefits.
A special note to managed service providers delivering cloud-powered data protection solutions — many organizations started with self-managed backup using cloud storage. But, later, they switched to an MSP in order to further leverage expertise around capabilities. These shifts are seen as having a prolific impact due to increased optimism around hybrid, multi and the importance of a comprehensive data protection strategy.
The author is Vice president of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam Software. Views are personal.
