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Data Backup Solutions: The Most Trending Features in 2021

As this year draws to a close, business owners reflect on the main challenges of 2020 and assess the key trends of 2021. The COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of this year has dramatically changed the business landscape. Small companies and big enterprises had to look for technologies that would facilitate their shift to remote work and make it more secure.

2020 Challenges for SMBs and Big Enterprises

Many businesses were not ready for the sudden shift to remote work or for the associated vulnerabilities. Therefore, the risk of data loss has naturally increased since the start of the pandemic. The new situation presented new opportunities for malicious attackers to compromise data and disrupt critical business operations. According to Check Point Research, in the last three months, the daily average of ransomware attacks has grown by 50% compared to the first half of 2020.1

Rapid digital transformation that we witnessed in 2020 not only affected the way businesses operate but also how they approach data protection. According to a new Kaspersky report, IT investments in cybersecurity have significantly increased — from 23% in 2019 to 26% in 2020 for SMBs, and from 26% to 29% for big enterprises.2 This shows that businesses realize the importance of strengthening their cyber defenses to prevent data loss and corruption.

What Data Protection Features Will Dominate in 2021

There are a few pandemic-related trends that have dominated the entirety of 2020 and are most likely to shape the cybersecurity landscape for the years ahead. Consider these trends when choosing the right backup and recovery solution and planning for data protection in 2021.

Multi-Cloud Backup

Modern businesses heavily rely on cloud storage as a backup destination due to its lauded flexibility and cost-effectiveness. In 2020, many IT decision-makers realized the benefits of keeping business data in multiple clouds. 2020 IDG Cloud Computing Survey revealed that 66% of enterprises and 47% of SMBs currently use multiple public clouds.3 Apart from high availability, multi-cloud backups also ensure data redundancy, which helps eliminate a single point of failure and minimize business disruptions. With such high demand for multi-cloud environments, businesses need to look for a scalable backup solution that can ensure unified data protection across private, public and hybrid clouds.

Ransomware Protection

Remote workforces are expected to remain a lucrative target for cybercriminals throughout 2021 and beyond. As ransomware attacks keep growing in their frequency as well as complexity, IT admins find it more challenging to detect or prevent them. A study by Sophos found that 51% of companies were hit by ransomware this year, and 25% of them could only get their data back by paying the ransom.4

Unfortunately, even with a comprehensive backup solution in place, there’s no guarantee for successful ransomware recovery as cybercriminals are now targeting backup data as well. To prevent data backups from being compromised, modern solutions offer built-in immutability which can significantly reduce the attack surface for big enterprises. This functionality ensures that backups and their copies are stored in the cloud using the write-once-read-many (WORM) model to prevent data from being encrypted, deleted or altered.

Apart from that, a backup solution should have the necessary tools to constantly monitor and analyze backup data. Once suspicious activity is detected, IT admins get the opportunity to identify a ransomware infection in its initial stages and employ the critical resources to contain it.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

This year proved that there’s always a potential for disruption. COVID-19 pandemic, transition to remote work, lockdown, the record-breaking hurricane season — all these events drove demand for reliable DRaaS solutions, especially among enterprises. According to the Global Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) Market 2020-2024 report, the DRaaS market is expected to grow by almost $28 billion in the next few years.5

DRaaS allows businesses to partner with a third-party service provider and use its cloud-computing infrastructure to ensure comprehensive data protection and recovery in case of a disaster. DRaaS helps relieve the stress of disaster recovery planning, minimize IT downtime and disruption with automated failover and failback, keep your production environments safe without overstraining the budget.

Time for a Change

To be always ready for any type of crisis, business owners need to understand the problems they currently face and find the data protection solution that can help resolve them once and for all. The best backup solution vendors are those that proactively respond to existing data protection trends and emerging threats by continuously expanding their functionality.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a leading solution that delivers all the powerful backup and recovery functionality required for seamless protection of virtual, physical, cloud and SaaS environments. With the 6 new product versions rolled out this year alone, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is determined to enhance its backup and recovery capabilities and deliver the best enterprise-grade protection on the market.

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1. Global Surges in Ransomware Attacks. Check Point, 2020.

2. Investment adjustment: aligning IT budgets with changing security priorities. Kaspersky, 2020.

3. 2020 IDG Cloud Computing Survey. IDG, 2020.

4. The State of Ransomware 2020. Sophos, 2020.

5. Global Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) Market 2020-2024. TechNavio, 2020.