Data protection has become a board-level priority, as the business value of data and the ransomware threat rise. Meanwhile, meeting data protection requirements becomes more challenging, as cloud and container resources enter the equation and require protection alongside physical and virtualized infrastructure. As a result, data protection teams are being tasked with doing more than ever before, new influencers are entering the equation, and new solution requirements are emerging.

To better understand current trends in Enterprise Data Protection practices, Evaluator Group surveyed over 130 enterprise customers and today released a research study covering the key findings.

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“Data protection teams must work closer than ever before with business leaders, in order to provide the levels of resiliency that critical business services require. This is a difficult task, however, as IT environments are spread across a wide variety of on- and off-premises infrastructures,” said Krista Macomber, Senior Analyst, Evaluator Group.

The survey showed that insufficient staffing has joined solution costs and limited budget as the top issues impacting the data protection space. In order to help data protection teams scale across these larger and more complex environments, 80% of respondents in Evaluator Group study have integrated public cloud resources as part of their data protection implementation, and 60% are using some form of managed services for data protection.

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In addition to being influenced by the need for simplicity, data protection purchase criteria and budgets are being materially influenced by cybersecurity requirements due to the rising incidence, severity, and prevalence of ransomware attacks. In fact, the ability to improve cybersecurity emerged as the top reason that customers would change their primary data protection vendor. Additionally, more than half of respondents indicated that the cybersecurity team influences requirements for data protection purchases.

‘The pressures on the C-Suite, including the CIO and CISO continue to rise as they implement multi-hybrid cloud environments. It opens the door to more data exposure and loss. Data Protection and its cousin, Data Security is no longer a lonely job, it has just gotten harder,” said Camberley Bates, Managing Director, Evaluator Group.

Evaluator Group’s new research study was created by conducting an incisive survey and in-depth interviews with IT professionals from North American and European enterprise-level companies. Interview respondents represented differing responsibility levels, from executive to operational administrator, and were distributed across most of the industries surveyed.

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