The results of the surveys affect our product strategy and go-to-market methods, and hopefully help organizations engage in deeper conversations with colleagues and teams as they continually consider modernizations to their data protection and cyber-resiliency strategies. This year’s report surveyed 1,200 respondents — comprised of CISOs (or executives with similar responsibility), security professionals, and backup administrators — whose organizations suffered at least one ransomware attack in 2023 to assess different perspectives in the united fight against ransomware.

As the third annual study of Data Protection Trends, this year’s survey was designed to quantify the shifts in overall concerns/goals and strategies for data protection, as well as gain an understanding of the current market landscape on data protection, disaster recovery, cybersecurity/ransomware and containers.

The survey asked about the impact that ransomware had on their environments, as well as what their IT strategies and data protection initiatives are moving forward. While analysts forecasted growth in overall IT spending for 2023 between 4.5%** by IDC and 5.4%*** by Gartner, respondents in this survey expect their cyber security (preventative) budgets to grow by 5.6% and their data protection (remediation) budgets to grow by 5.5% in 2023.

This is the second annual survey of organizations who suffered cyberattacks with a key focus to compare the viewpoints of four different roles that are involved in cyber-preparedness and/ or mitigation: Security professionals, CISO or other IT executives, IT Operations generalists and backup administrators.

This report explores how businesses worldwide are approaching data management, the most common challenges with backups and availability, and the lessons leaders can learn from how high-performing businesses are using data as they continue to transform.