Veeam data report underlines role for the channel

Veeam has alerted its channel base to the opportunities uncovered by its Data Protection Trends 2020 report.

The vendor found that many customers were looking at offerings, including backup as a service (BaaS), because they lacked the in-house skills to implement more digital transformation.

“There is a big opportunity for those partners that have the skills,” said Alex Walsh, manager of channels UK & Ireland at Veeam.

He added that there had been an increase in the number of customers showing interest in cloud data management and the channel could reach out and have a conversation around that area.

“We have been talking to partners about their cloud journey for three years, and there are feet on the street looking to leverage these services,” said Walsh.

The headline findings from the report highlighted several areas where the channel could look to add value and solve customer challenges.

The report found that 68% of UK organisations had an “availability gap” between how fast they could recover applications and how fast they needed to recover them. There were also issues around how often data was backed up.

When asked what their main concerns were, economic uncertainty topped the list – understandable given the current situation. That was followed by cyber threats and meeting changing customer needs.

Just shy of half of UK firms (49%) admitted that a lack of IT staff was preventing their business from moving forward with digital transformation. Other hurdles that firms feared they would have to jump included a dependency on legacy systems, limited budgets, lack of time and a lack of buy-in from senior management.

Veeam’s report also found that there was growing interest in backup as a service and that getting data protection right was more than just a theoretical idea, with 95% of global organisations suffering unexpected outages which lasted, on average, 117 minutes.