Cloud Investments Grow while Data Protection Lags Behind

Arcserve, LLC announced its annual independent global research conducted by Dimensional Research.

The study found that 43% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) falsely believe that cloud providers are responsible for protecting and recovering data in the public cloud. This misconception of data protection responsibility can lead to increased vulnerability, especially amid a growing cloud investment trend for the cloud.

The annual global survey uncovers a consistent misperception regarding the responsibility for data stored in public clouds. In 2019, 46% of ITDMs believed it was the cloud provider’s responsibility. The misconception persisted in 2020, with 44% believing the same, and stands at 43% in the latest research.

The research highlights several additional factors that reveal a concerning lag in data protection, including:

• Nearly ⅔ of ITDMs surveyed believe cloud backups are safer than on-premises backups.
• ⅓ reported poorly documented DR plans.
• 41% reported that their organization’s DR plans were not updated.

Said Florian Malecki, EVP marketing, said: “Organizations need to understand that data protection and recovery responsibility lies with them, not with the cloud provider. The time to act is now, particularly amid growing hybrid and multi-cloud adoption as proven by our annual research with some 82% of ITDMs expecting to increase hybrid cloud investments and 70% expecting to increase multi-cloud investment.“

About the research conducted by Dimensional Research: 1,121 IT decision-makers completed the survey. All participants had a budget or technical decision-making responsibility for data management, data protection, and storage solutions at a company with 100-2,500 employees and at least 5TB of data. The survey was fielded in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, the UK, USA, and Canada (North America).