Cloud Data Protection Strategies: Protecting Data To and In the Cloud ESG Report

The broad adoption of cloud services as a source of business-critical data is placing the onus on data owners to deliver on data protection SLAs of data and applications that are hosted in the cloud. Concurrently, on-premises backup and disaster recovery workloads are leveraging cloud destinations, resulting in hybrid data protection topologies with varying service levels, end-user tradeoffs, and opportunities. How are IT organizations utilizing cloud services as part of their data protection strategy today? In order to get more insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 370 IT professionals at organizations in North America (U.S. and Canada) responsible for data protection technology decisions for their organization, specifically around those data protection and production technologies that may leverage cloud services as part of the solution.

This study sought to:

• Determine how organizations utilize cloud services as part of their data protection strategy.
• Establish users’ understanding of what exact data protection levels public cloud infrastructure and SaaS solutions provide.
• Identify current business requirements driving modern and increasingly cloud-centric data protection strategies.
• Monitor year-over-year trends with respect to evolving data protection cloud strategies.

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, health care, communications and media, retail, government, and business services.