The survey found that companies are challenged with more complex hybrid IT environments and are raising budgets to fend off #cyberattacks as well as keep up as production environments continue to diversify across various clouds. The result is that IT leaders feel they aren’t sufficiently protected.

A top priority of organizations this year is improving reliability and success of backups, followed by ensuring that Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service protection is equitable to the protection they rely on for datacenter-centric workloads.

Globally, organizations expect to increase their data protection budget in 2023 by 6.5%, which is notably higher than overall spending plans in other areas of IT. Of the 85% of organizations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3% and often in concert with increased investments in #cybersecurity tools.

Cyberattacks caused the most impactful outages for organizations in 2020, 2021 and 2022, according to the report. 85% of organizations were attacked at least once in the past 12 months; up from 76% in last year’s report. Specifically, recovery is a main concern as organizations reported that only 55% of their encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable from attacks.

According to the survey, the single most important aspect that organizations are looking for in a Modern Data Protection solution is the “integration of data protection within a cyber preparedness strategy.

Secondly, due to its burden on budgets and manpower, ransomware and the current volatile cyber security landscape are taking priority for IT teams. This is causing IT resources and budgets originally allocated towards Digital Transformation initiatives to pivot to cyber prevention. Not only do cyberattacks drain operational budgets from ransoms to recovery efforts, but they also reduce organizations’ ability to modernize for their future success; instead, they .