Dan74 - stock.adobe.com

Veeam urges partners to plug backup gaps

Research from vendor exposes significant number of customers that are failing to protect their data

Veeam is urging its channel to pick up on the findings of its latest Data Protection Report and encourage more customers to review their backup and restore strategies.

The firm has revealed that at least 31% of all backups are non-restorable in UK organisations, meaning any attempt to pull the information back would end in errors or complaints and 26% of all restorations that could be done would fail to meet SLAs.

Even more disturbingly the report revealed that 14% of UK customers were flying on a wing and a prayer and did not back their data up at all.

Globally those numbers are even higher, with 58% of all backups failing, underlining the extent of issue that the channel could address.

“Customers are really looking at how they make sure they’ve got an airtight solution because a lot of those backup job have failed on them,” said Alex Walsh, manager of channels and alliances for UK and Ireland at Veeam Software.

“The pandemic’s highlighted to a lot of businesses that there was always competition in any industry, but unfortunately the output of the pandemic has been that a lot of businesses aren’t here and a lot of businesses now moving to be online, which means that they’ve got to make sure that data is recoverable at all times and applications are up and running,” he added.

Walsh added that the pandemic had put a strain on many customers: “As we navigate through the pandemic we see the gaps in what customers have been able to adapt to.”

The main findings

The main focus was on the impact of data loss with 23% of servers experiencing at least one unplanned outage, 37% of all backup jobs failing, 34% of all restores and 58% of recovery not working.

The impact of the pandemic on strategy was also tracked with 60% reporting greater cloud adoption, 48% an increase in SaaS usage and 54% accelerated their hybrid-IT deployment.

The report found that 95% of those quizzed had seen outages in the past year, and been forced to find out just how robust their backup and restore policies were.

From a partner perspective, the pitch for those customers that are operating without backup, or with a system that is doomed to fail, was fairly clear.

But Walsh added that even for those in the channel that worked with customers that had strategies in place, the evolution in the market meant there was still a need for a conversation about the future strategy.

“What does the opportunity look like?” and “what’s the right solution for the customer?” were the questions partners should be asking against a background of more workloads being spread across multi-clouds and technologies.

The report found that 33% of customers were using a backup as a service provider, and Veeam expects that to hit 50% over the next couple of years.

Read more on Enterprise Storage Management

ComputerWeekly.com
ITChannel
Close