Digital Transformation and Data Protection

In its latest Veeam Software, Inc.‘s 2020 Data Protection Trends Report (registration required), the firm details how companies are approaching data protection and management and how they are preparing for the IT challenges ahead.

In addition to the structural barriers, such as legacy infrastructure or lack of IT skills, that complicate the process of digital transformation for businesses, new underlying issues are emerging. All of them tend to want to move towards optimal operational efficiency in order to successfully complete their transformation.
 
Digital transformation and data protection: where do French companies stand?
Backup and protection is a major issue for companies today. Although most of them have become aware of this, this wish has yet to be fulfilled in the field. Indeed, according to the study, 71% of French companies note an “availability gap” between the speed at which they can restore their applications and the speed at which they would like to be able to restore them. The same observation applies to data protection, with 65% of French companies noting a “protection gap” between the frequency with which their data is backed up and the amount of data they feel they can afford to lose after a failure. These 2 figures reflect a real disparity between needs and reality, and remind companies of the need to equip themselves with solutions that allow them to reduce this gap, in a minimum amount of time.
 
Additional results provide some answers as to why backup and protection is not yet fully ensured for French companies, the main one being the lack of staff to work on new initiatives (24%). The next most common data protection challenges are the lack of visibility into operational performance (23%) and the lack of capacity to support DevOps or AppDev (21%). IT infrastructure has become more complex over time, creating more vulnerabilities within businesses and more difficult to find qualified personnel to master it.

Generally speaking, the lack of skills among IT staff is a challenge that affects nearly one out of every two companies in France (46%) and is a major obstacle to their digital transformation, followed by dependence on legacy systems (39%), lack of time (32%) and limited budgets (31%).
 
Cost argument, at the heart of challenges of digital transformation
In the race for digital transformation, decisions are taken in consultation by two stakeholders: the CIOs on the one hand, who bring their technical expertise, and the CEOs on the other, whose objectives are more general and economic. Respecting the budgets allocated while effectively renewing technological tools is becoming increasingly difficult. CIOs have to make a permanent trade-off between the cost of renewal and the company’s ambitions in terms of digital integration to increase its competitiveness. They must justify their requests by knowing how to showcase the gain and added value that these financial investments represent for the company in order to convince their management.
 
Finally, according to the report, the most common reason for changing a company’s primary backup solution is to reduce hardware and software costs (37% of respondents). The next two reasons, tied (35%), are the need for ROI and TCO on the one hand, and the desire to improve backup reliability on the other. These results show that infrastructure cost is still the number one issue for most companies, and confirm the importance of choosing solutions that offer a rapid ROI, such as those offered by Veeam.
 
About the report
Veeam commissioned Vanson Bourne Ltd, a technology sector research partner, to conduct an online survey of 1,550 randomly selected business leaders and ITDMs across 22 different countries, in early 2020. The countries surveyed include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Middle East, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and the USA.