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What is data protection modernization worth? For many companies, it’s priceless! To understand why, let’s look at major trends having a significant impact on data protection and how companies are evolving their data protection solutions to address new requirements.

Enormous growth in digital content, broad adoption of AI and data analytics, additional regulatory reporting requirements and the emergence of the Internet of Things are all driving explosive data growth. So, it’s no surprise that according to IDC we are seeing 10X growth in data between 2016 and 2025. Thus, businesses want data protection capabilities that help them reduce storage costs. Some effective data reduction methods are data compression, deduplication and space-efficient snapshots.

The need to reduce storage costs is also driving the need for cost-effective alternatives to block storage for long-term data retention, disaster recovery and data reuse. The traditional solution for cheap and deep storage has previously been tape, but more and more, it’s object storage. According to 2019 ESG quantitative research conducted on behalf of IBM, 86 percent of companies use or want to use object storage, and two-thirds desire an on-premises option.

In addition, organizations are rapidly expanding their use of DevOps, analytics, and AI. They have realized that if they create managed copies of their backup data, and allow data-hungry workloads like DevOps, analytics and AI to access those copies, they can make more productive use of their data. The ESG research highlights this, indicating that 86 percent of organizations that allow business analysts to run analytics on secondary copies of data in a self-serve fashion feel they have increased the efficacy of analysis.

Finally, there’s the need for better data security. The number of data breaches in the US and everywhere in the world is skyrocketing. The World Economic Forum says companies have a 1 in 4 odds of experiencing a data breach over the next two years. If a data breach happens, storage and backup administrators play a vital role in making certain their companies can rapidly recover data and quickly restore operations back to normal. This is giving rise to air-gapping and new capabilities for locking down data. According to the ESG research, data protection modernization means “improving data security” to 41 percent of companies.

All of these factors are having a direct effect on data protection modernization. Data backup techniques that worked decade ago can’t keep up with the data volumes, business uptime requirements and data security needs of today. Modern capabilities, such as instant data recovery, data reduction technology and the ability to support cyber resiliency are now essential. As a result, companies are increasingly moving to modern data protection solutions. According to the ESG Research, 73 percent of the companies surveyed rate data protection modernization as a top-five IT priority in the next 12 months.

Want to know more? Click here and check out the ESG Research Insight Paper Trends in Modern Data Protection.

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