N2WS is excited to share insights from our 6th annual cloud data protection survey, highlighting the newest trends in cloud protection practices. We are committed to understanding the evolving cloud landscape, and always look forward to revealing trends, concerns, future road maps and proven best practices from the hundreds of backup IT admins interviewed.
Most organizations that use the cloud recognize the importance of backing up their workloads, and the core concepts that power cloud backup and data recovery haven’t changed much in recent years.
But that doesn’t mean that businesses are not finding creative and cutting-edge ways to improve or enhance their cloud data protection strategies. On the contrary, as the results from this year’s N2WS Cloud Data Protection Survey show, plenty of change is afoot in the realm of backup and recovery for cloud workloads.
To prove the point and highlight some of the latest trends in cloud data protection, let’s walk through seven key findings from our survey. As you’ll learn, the takeaways we’ve uncovered help to explain what sets basic cloud data protection strategies apart from what you might call next-generation practices that double down on the value, effectiveness and efficiency of cloud backup and data recovery.
#1. Cost has become a top-of-mind consideration for data protection
Traditionally, the top priority for most businesses’ cloud data protection strategies was ensuring that workloads were reliably protected against the risk of data loss and disruption.
But our survey data suggests that keeping data protection costs in check has become another paramount consideration. Asked which capabilities they value most in cloud data protection software, a number of respondents mentioned the ability to optimize costs.
For instance, one respondent mentioned the importance of being able to “replicate data cross accounts and regions while maintaining incremental copies to minimize data transfer costs.” Another cited cost-explorer features in data protection tools that help determine how much backup policies cost, adding that “I just discovered we have not been deleting old snapshots in DR account wasting big $$$$.”
In addition, many survey respondents mentioned cloud data protection software features like the ability to store archived snapshots into Amazon S3 Glacier as an important capability. Those who automatically archive to Glacier Instant Retrieval tier using N2WS enjoy very low-cost storage without any recovery time lag, which means that leveraging it for archived snapshots is a great way to help minimize backup storage costs.
Concerns about data protection cost optimization are unsurprising given ongoing global economic turbulence and high inflation rates, as well as the pressure that IT leaders face to invest in new types of technologies, like generative AI. As IDC notes, all of these factors are placing constraints on IT budgets and motivating IT departments to find ways of delivering the same levels of service at a lower cost. Features that help reduce the cost of cloud data protection without compromising on reliability are one way to square this circle.
#2. The increasing importance of cross-cloud backup
Multi-cloud architectures – which entail the use of multiple cloud platforms at once – are not exactly a new idea at this point. However, survey data suggests that businesses are still in the process of evolving their cloud data protection strategies for a multi-cloud world.
When we asked N2WS customers which new features they find most interesting or important in recent releases of the product, support for cross-cloud archiving from AWS to Azure repository was among the top responses. This feature makes it possible to create backups on one cloud and store them on another – which means that if one of your cloud environments fails, your data will remain safe and available in the other one. What’s more, you can restore directly to the other cloud environment if you wish, without having to wait for the cloud that failed to come back up.
It makes sense that organizations would value cross-cloud backup features given that many of them are using multiple clouds. Our survey found that 38 percent of respondents use both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure. 16 percent use these platforms in addition to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Virtually all of the rest use AWS alone, although a handful also reported using IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
We should note that our data might be a bit skewed because N2WS initially focused on AWS data protection, so our customer base has historically been AWS-centric – but that is changing now that N2WS has evolved into a cross-cloud backup solution.
#3. A growing focus on cross-account recovery
The ability to backup and restore data across clouds is one way to gain flexibility from your cloud data protection strategy. Another is to enable cross-account recovery, a feature that 28 percent identified as being important to them when choosing cloud backup software.
With cross-account recovery, data or workloads created under one cloud account can be seamlessly restored under a different account. This is particularly useful in scenarios where a cloud account was compromised via ransomware or internal data breach and an organization wants to restore its resources under a different account that it knows to be secure.
In addition, cross-account recovery can be helpful when broken configurations under one account cause a disruption and restoring under a different “clean” account is the fastest, simplest way to get back up and running.
#4. Businesses want to back up cloud networks, too
Another of the top features that survey respondents reported finding most valuable in cloud data protection software was support for VPC capture, which 19 percent of survey respondents are currently using. This capability allows businesses to back up the networking settings they use to manage Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), load balancers and traffic gateways so that they can restore network configurations quickly instead of having to rebuild them manually when recovering from a failure.
The ability to back up this configuration data is tremendously valuable.The value of VPC capture features seems obvious enough: It helps ensure smoother, faster recovery and minimizes the time and effort that engineers must spend rebuilding network configurations to get failed services fully back up and running. But it’s notable that organizations are now viewing network setting backup as a key capability alongside more traditional types of data protection features, like backing up data and applications themselves.
#5. Disaster recovery testing and drills are becoming a priority
Being able to back up cloud data and settings reliably is one thing. Ensuring you can actually recover from them is another – and it appears that a growing number of organizations are investing in disaster recovery testing and drills to ensure that their backups will do what they need them to do in the event of a failure – and that if something does go wrong, they troubleshoot and fix it on their schedule, instead of scrambling to find a resolution in the midst of an actual data recovery scenario. Recovery testing helps ensure that issues like broken network configurations will prevent successful recovery based on backups, or that recovery will take longer than expected due to slow data transfer and cause an organization to fall short of its RTO and RPO goals.
A number of survey respondents mentioned recovery testing as a key capability in cloud backup software. For instance, “most importantly, restores can be easily tested,” one user wrote when explaining why they use N2WS. Another said, “With just a few clicks I was able to run recovery scenarios to check whether the created environment is proper or not.”
In addition, 22 percent of respondents said that support for recovery drills was one of the most important features in their cloud backup and recovery solution.
Going forward, we anticipate that more and more businesses will expect the ability to automate not just cloud backups, but recovery testing as well.
#6. A focus on granular control over recovery
In addition to being able to test recovery plans, organizations are also keen to gain fine-grained control over how recovery plays out – or so we conclude based on our finding that 34 percent of survey respondents value the ability to orchestrate recovery using N2WS’s Recovery Scenarios capability.
Recovery Scenarios makes it possible to configure specific properties for individual workloads and ensure that they are recovered in a particular way. For instance, you can restore an application’s network settings, or restore to a specific point in time. Recovery Scenarios also support recovery dry runs, making it easy to test recovery operations.
This trend is notable because it suggests that simply recovering cloud resources is no longer enough in the eyes of many organizations. They are also seeking more granular control over exactly how recovery plays out – which makes sense because the greater your ability to fine-tune recovery settings, the faster and more efficiently you can recover, and the less work your engineers will have to do post-recovery to restore any settings or resources that went missing during automated recovery operations.
#7. The need for file- and folder-level recovery
A desire for more granular recovery options was also reflected in the importance of file- and folder-level recovery features, which 23 percent of survey respondents identified as being among the most valuable features in their cloud backup solution.
This capability makes it possible to recover individual files or folders, as opposed to recovering an entire cloud server image or database. This is useful in situations where just certain files were damaged and restoring an entire system would take much more time than recovering just the specific files that were lost.
In addition, the granular control over recovery that this feature offers can be critical in the event that you need to cleanse malware from a compromised file system. If you discover that the malware infected your backups in addition to your production systems, being able to recover at the file or folder level can help you avoid restoring the malware along with the rest of your system.
Expecting more from cloud backup and recovery
Taken together, the 2024 N2WS Cloud Data Protection Survey results make clear that businesses have come to expect more from cloud backup and recovery. The mere ability to back up data and (hopefully) restore data and workloads isn’t enough. Today, organizations demand cloud backup solutions that minimize overall backup and storage costs, while also supporting complex and nuanced needs – such as cross-cloud and cross-account recovery and automated recovery testing.
We’ve packed all of these features, and much more, into N2WS. See for yourself by requesting a free trial.
Taking data backup and recovery to the next level
Today, having basic data backup and recovery practices in place is like washing your hands when you use the restroom: It’s a fundamental expectation, not a sign of special enlightenment. If you want to stand out from the crowd – and optimize your business’s ability to protect itself against cyberattack and accidental data loss – you need to aim higher by implementing solutions like failover regions, backup security, and beyond.
N2WS makes it easy to implement a next-level backup and recovery strategy. With N2WS, you get not just a comprehensive set of backup, disaster recovery, and lifecycle management capabilities, but also the ability to perform regular disaster recovery drills and tests and create documentation along the way. N2WS lets you identify which resources to prioritize during recovery, too, and it offers advanced features like cross-region backup and infrastructure settings cloning.
To see for yourself, request a free trial.
Chris Tozzi
Chris, who has worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator, is a freelance writer specializing in areas such as DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and AI and machine learning. He is also an adviser for Fixate IO, an adjunct research adviser for IDC, and a professor of IT and society at a polytechnic university in upstate New York.
