IDC Study Highlights Need for Continuous Data Protection

A recent IDC report about the urgent need for effective disaster recovery responses underscored a growing role for continuous data protection technology.

The report, The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness: 2022, revealed that 93% of organizations have suffered a data-related business disruption during the past 12 months. About 68% of organizations experienced four or more such disruptions. Organizations reported an average of 19.3 attacks (of all types) and 2.3 ransomware attacks in the past year. IDC polled 509 IT and business leaders from medium to large organizations in North America and Western Europe.

“These ransomware and malware attack statistics are stunning, with the odds of becoming a victim no longer a matter of if or when but how often,” said Phil Goodwin, research vice president, infrastructure systems, platforms, and technologies group, at IDC. “As a result, modernizing data protection, including backup and DR, is a high priority for many IT organizations.”

Lack of Confidence in Backup and DR

The IDC study also revealed that 79% of organizations have activated a disaster recovery response within the past 12 months, with 61% of these incidents triggered by ransomware or other malware. Sixty percent of survey respondents said they had unrecoverable data during that same time. Of the organizations that reported getting attacked, 83% had at least one attack that resulted in data corruption.

Related:What Are Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?

The strong likelihood of suffering a breach has made backup and disaster recovery all the more important. However, the study found that most organizations lack confidence in their current backup and DR technologies. Only 28% of the surveyed IT and business leaders expressed complete confidence in their backup system’s ability to recover data, while 29% said they have complete confidence in their DR technology to recover data.

In addition, the proliferation of applications and the associated growth of data creation are making it harder to keep data always available. The IDC study indicates that more than 80% of new applications will be deployed in the cloud or at the edge, with most cloud applications being either SaaS or cloud-native, containerized configurations. As a result of this shift to the cloud, IDC predicts that 55% of organizations will adopt a cloud-centric data protection strategy by 2025. Although data will continue to be protected at the core, in the cloud, and at the edge, IDC expects that enterprise data protection and DR will be managed from the cloud.

Continuous Data Protection Enters the Spotlight

In response to these challenges, the IDC report highlights the growing role of continuous data protection (CDP), with its ability to “significantly reduce the potential for data loss, regardless of cause, while reducing the time to recovery and simplifying recovery.”

As IDC points out, CDP captures data changes as they are written, which shrinks the recovery point objective to seconds and virtually eliminates the “backup gap” that can cause data loss.

IDC expects continuous data protection technology to receive more attention as organizations pursue service-level agreements that require zero downtime with zero data loss, Goodwin noted.

“With many new applications being deployed at the core, cloud, and edge, IT organizations are facing ever-increasing complexity in providing data protection and DR,” said Caroline Seymour, vice president of product marketing at Zerto, a backup and DR vendor and Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. Zerto commissioned IDC to conduct the survey.

“By using CDP to return to a point just seconds or minutes prior to an attack or any disruption, recoveries can be made quickly and with minimal data loss, especially when combined with recovery orchestration and automation,” Seymour added.