As IT environments grow more complex, IT professionals are facing unprecedented pressure to secure business-critical data. With hybrid work the new standard and cloud adoption on the rise, data is increasingly distributed across different environments, providers and locations, expanding the attack surface for emerging cyberthreats. While the need for a strong data protection strategy has become more critical than ever, organizations find themselves caught in a difficult balancing act. They are struggling to manage the rising costs and complexities of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) while ensuring that their business-critical data remains secure and recoverable.
To help IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) understand how their peers are navigating these challenges, the State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025 has gathered insights from more than 3,000 IT professionals, security experts and administrators worldwide. The report reveals how businesses are tackling today’s biggest data protection challenges, the strategies they’re adopting and the critical gaps that could leave them vulnerable to data loss and downtime.
So, where do organizations stand? The survey indicates that the confidence in backup systems is declining, cloud adoption is outpacing data protection strategies and recovery expectations often don’t match reality. In this article, we’ll explore the key findings from the report to help IT teams and MSPs stay prepared for what comes next. Meanwhile, for full insights and actionable strategies, you can download the complete report now and see how your organization compares.
Data backup and recovery should be a safety net for businesses, but for many, it has become a source of frustration, complexity and risk. The numbers tell a clear story — backup inefficiencies are rising, IT teams are overburdened and security vulnerabilities remain widespread. Let’s dive into the key findings.
9 in 10 organizations experienced operational downtime in the past 12 months.
Trust in backup solutions is slipping, leaving many businesses questioning whether they can reliably recover from data loss.
Managing backups isn’t just complex — it’s draining IT resources. As data volumes grow, IT teams are spending more time than ever maintaining backup systems, testing recovery processes and troubleshooting failures.
Backup systems are supposed to be the last line of defense against cyberthreats. However, many contain serious security flaws that put data at risk.
Having the backup of data is one thing; recovering it quickly and reliably is another. IT teams face significant hurdles in ensuring fast, seamless recovery when disaster strikes.
The top concerns cited by IT teams with respect to data protection are costs, compliance requirements and the actual process of recovering data. Since IT teams spend hours managing and troubleshooting backup issues, it leaves little time for testing and validating recovery processes, increasing the risk of failure when it matters most.
A backup solution is only as good as its ability to restore data, yet testing remains inconsistent across organizations.
The lack of frequent testing is evident when looking at actual recovery times.
The cloud is now the backbone of modern IT, powering everything from infrastructure to collaboration. Businesses are rapidly adopting cloud and SaaS solutions to enhance flexibility and scalability, but many are overlooking a critical factor: data protection.
The shift to cloud-hosted workloads is only growing stronger, driven by the need for agility and resilience.
Most organizations now leverage hybrid and multicloud strategies to increase flexibility and avoid reliance on a single provider. However, gaps in cloud and SaaS data protection remain, putting critical business information at risk. Notably, SaaS platforms now serve as the backbone of daily business operations, but without the right backup strategies, this data remains vulnerable.
While cloud adoption continues to accelerate, businesses still face major hurdles in ensuring a seamless transition and securing their data.
The State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025 reveals that critical security gaps remain while securing on-premises, cloud, endpoint and SaaS data. There is a growing disconnect between backup investments and actual recovery confidence, with IT teams unsure whether they can restore data when it matters most. Without a more resilient approach to data protection, businesses risk prolonged downtime, drastic financial losses and irreversible data breaches.
Have you considered how much an outage could cost your organization per minute? According to the IT Outages: 2024 Costs and Containment Report, the average cost of unplanned downtime is $14,056 per minute per organization.
Let’s take a closer look at the breakdown of downtime costs across different business sizes.
Business continuity depends on faster, more resilient recovery. However, many organizations aren’t as prepared as they think. To minimize downtime and financial losses, IT leaders must rethink their approach to BCDR. A modern BCDR strategy goes beyond basic backup, incorporating multilayered security, automation and hybrid cloud solutions to strengthen resilience and ensure business continuity against today’s sophisticated cyberthreats.
Protection alone isn’t enough, though. Without regular testing, organizations are left guessing whether their recovery plans will hold up in a real crisis. More frequent backup and disaster recovery testing ensures that recovery objectives are met when it matters most. Automation plays a key role there. By automating testing, IT teams can continuously verify their ability to restore data within required timeframes — all without disrupting the production environment. This removes the manual burden and provides real insights into recovery readiness.
At the same time, stronger security controls are also essential to protecting backup environments from unauthorized access. Almost 94% of ransomware victims have their backups targeted by attackers, which leaves them with no other choice but to pay the ransom to get back their access. On that front, improving credential management and enforcing stricter access controls can help prevent malicious actors from accessing backup infrastructure.
The IT landscape is changing, and with it, the risks are escalating. As businesses push further into the cloud and rely more on SaaS applications, their backup and disaster recovery strategies must evolve just as quickly. Cyberthreats are more advanced, downtime is more expensive and organizations can no longer afford to treat backup as an afterthought. To keep pace with this new reality, businesses must reassess their approach and strengthen their defenses against the growing threats that could bring operations to a halt.
For IT teams and MSPs, the insights from the State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025 provide a clear roadmap to assess vulnerabilities and improve resilience before disaster strikes. Download the full report now to benchmark your strategy, uncover critical gaps, and build a stronger, more reliable BCDR plan for the future.
