A new survey has revealed that more than 30% of IT professionals are losing sleep over their backup and recovery preparedness – and many are less prepared than they believe.
The Unified Backup Survey Report 2025 sheds light on the current trends in backup and recovery and how they are reshaping the data protection landscape.
The Kaseya report,The State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025: Navigating the Future of Data Protection, surveyed over 3,000 IT professionals worldwide and revealed 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, lacking confidence in their backup.
The survey revealed that only 15% of companies test their backups daily with another 25% testing weekly, while 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. 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. Nearly half of respondents would need weeks to recover data from a public cloud and 8% do not back up their public cloud data at all.
More than half of the businesses surveyed plan to switch their primary backup solution, but optimising cloud costs emerged as the greatest challenge for those looking to move workloads to the cloud with 15% having difficulty finding the right cloud service provider.
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.
Most importantly, an apex backup infrastructure should have a strategic plan in place for scalability with clearly defined backup policies and backup security systems by implementing multi-layered security measures to protect against evolving threats.
“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.”