Report outlines top trends in backup and recovery

Kaseya has released The State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025: Navigating the Future of Data Protection. The survey of over 3,000 IT professionals worldwide reveals the importance of data protection and the increased need for robust backup and recovery strategies to address current and future challenges. While 40% felt confident in their systems, 33% have reported nightmares – and many are less prepared than they believe.

“In today’s cyber landscape, it’s hard to be confident about any systems you’re using,” said Frank DeBenedetto, GTM General Manager, MSP Suite, Kaseya. “So much is out of your control, it’s not surprising that nearly a third of IT professionals have had nightmares about their backup. From human error to natural disasters to ransomware attacks, the only way to know your systems work is to test them repeatedly.”

Security and Recovery

With only 10% of businesses reporting zero outages last year, many businesses tested their backups in a trial by fire – if nothing else. Only 15% test their backups daily with another 25% testing weekly. Disaster recovery tests were given even less attention, with only 11% testing daily and 20% testing weekly. And 12% of those surveyed admitted they tested their disaster recovery on an ad hoc basis or not at all.

Looking at recovery times, 60% of respondents believed they could recover in under a day; however, only 35% could do so in reality. Approximately 40% of respondents can recover lost SaaS data in hours, with others requiring days or weeks (35%). More concerning, 8% were unsure of their recovery time and 2% didn’t believe they could recover any lost SaaS data. An alarming 40% of respondents would need days or weeks to recover data from a public cloud and 8% do not back up their public cloud data at all.

Challenges

More than half of the businesses surveyed plan to switch their primary backup solution but are finding major challenges in trying to do so. Price is one of the leading challenges. With IT budgets tightening, businesses need to find a way to balance cost efficiency while maintaining a robust data protection strategy. Optimizing cloud costs emerged as the greatest challenge for businesses looking to move workloads to the cloud with 15% having difficulty finding the right cloud service provider for their business.

Having multiple backup tools created inefficiencies for 10% of businesses and over half of those surveyed spent more than 2 hours a day monitoring, managing and troubleshooting backups. When looking at their current infrastructure, 10% of businesses said alerting and reporting is a challenge because their backup systems don’t have actionable insights and deep enough visibility.

Best Practices

As businesses look to switch their backup solutions in today’s complex hybrid IT environment, they must ensure they’re taking every consideration to protect their data, as well as their client and consumers’ data. By leveraging advanced technologies, like cloud-native solutions and automated testing tools, businesses can save time and effort on time consuming tasks. With the right vendor, they can become even more efficient thanks to integrated solutions and premium support.

Most importantly, an apex backup infrastructure should have a strategic plan in place that plans for scalability and clearly defines backup policies. The plan will help ensure enhanced security of backup systems by implementing multilayered security measures and regularly auditing systems to ensure they’re protected against evolving threats.