By: Ian Engelbrecht, System Engineering Manager, Veeam Software

According to the  Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023, 79% of companies surveyed across the Middle East and Africa indicated they have a protection gap between how much data they can lose and how frequently the IT department protects their data. When combined with the fact that 87% of businesses in the region experienced cyberattacks in 2022, it has become a business imperative to safeguard data to ensure operations can continue as effectively as possible in the event of a breach, accidental deletion, or other disasters – cyber or otherwise.

The scale, volume, and complexity of data within enterprises today requires organisations to adopt more advanced levels of protection and backup capabilities. For example, enterprise data is measured in petabytes (1000 terabytes) which is a far larger number than most small-to-medium businesses have to deal with.  Added to this is the reality that many enterprises hold data across multiple ecosystems – legacy, physical, cloud, containers and hybrids of the aforementioned.

With World Backup Day recognised annually every March, each year enterprise decision-makers are once again reminded of the need to embrace a Modern Data Protection strategy reflective of their operational and IT needs. Put another way, as organisations modernise their production environments, they need to modernise how they protect their data too. 

Understanding enterprise backup

Like all organisations, enterprises require a comprehensive backup solution capable of protecting workloads across any IT environment. It should be intuitive to use and able to be configured to meet all their data security, backup and recovery requirements. Fast recovery from secure, immutable backups is vital as businesses live or die by their ability to recover all of their data fast and get back to normal operations quickly. Automation doesn’t just speed recovery, it reduces the strain on often limited human resources. However, any new backup solution must be able to operate across all three architectures of physical, virtual and cloud, and have flexibility to allow for it to achieve everything the legacy product did and more, while catering for future innovations such as automated restore and testing.

Having an effective and tailored Modern Data Protection solution in place provides IT teams with more time to focus on other strategic imperatives. In this way, data protection becomes a single process that is significantly easier to manage. By simplifying the job of the technical specialist, automated backup solutions can deliver the means for the enterprise to more actively enhance its infrastructure for Day 2 processes.

Essentially, an effective Modern Data Protection solution for the enterprise will address the objectives of the C-Suite, as well as simplify the job of the engineer working “on the ground”, so to speak, whose role it is to protect vital data infrastructure. 

Beyond ransomware

Even though the threat of ransomware and other forms of cyberattacks are ever-present, natural disasters and the failures of existing IT systems to drive broader business continuity and disaster recovery cannot be ignored. The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023 has found that 41% companies across the Middle East and Africa plan to orchestrate recovery workflows, instead of relying on manual processes, to enhance the backup and recovery function.

Additionally, 41% of companies will also leverage cloud infrastructures for their business continuity and disaster recovery resulting in increased adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions. The challenge comes in when it is time to move beyond the reliance on hybrid IT solutions and focus on more dedicated data protection systems.

Data security in the hybrid IT age poses a real challenge for the enterprise. As organisations move data outside the four walls of a legacy structure, they increase their exposure to attack vectors. Thus increasing the areas of the business that can be the target of cyberattacks, such as ransomware. 

At a fundamental level, companies must look to strengthening their workloads outside the traditional security perimeters of the past. To do so requires adopting cloud-based offerings that enhance existing defensive measures, regardless of the ecosystem data runs across. 

For instance, a solution like the new Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7 strengthens data protection by enabling immutability, and delivering advanced monitoring and analytics across the backup infrastructure environment. Most importantly, a solution such as this delivers complete visibility into the ‘data real estate’ of a business.

As the year progresses, more companies across the Middle East and Africa region will expand their IT investments to focus on harnessing cloud-native solutions to optimise the digital transformation efforts already put in place. All of this is made possible by ensuring that flexible, reliable, and powerful Modern Data Protection remains at the core.

Keeping things reliable

The reliability and consistency of the cloud environment in this regard becomes key. More businesses will start consuming hyperscaler platforms and move out of the legacy data centre. While it does expand the attack surface the organisation faces (securely connecting the data pipeline from on-premises to the cloud is a major priority), it also brings with it the scalability essential to keep data available.

Modernising their Data Protection in line with their production environments will provide digitally-driven businesses with the means to keep their data always available, while reducing the protection gap and ensuring their solution can scale to meet the needs of the business and its employees – be they office-based, remote or hybrid workers – so mission-critical apps and data are available whenever and wherever they are needed.