A new report from backup monitoring and reporting company Bocada LLC finds that information technology professionals are faced with new challenges in the critical task of backups.

The firm’s recent survey found that the wide variety of backup environments as well as data volume growth will continue driving backup monitoring difficulties. Securing data across backup applications most cited by those responsible for them, closely followed by protecting growing data volume.

The IT professionals surveyed identified an issue where automation lags in the backup management category, but the company claims solutions are on the horizon. Nearly two-thirds reported that zero automation was applied to recurring backup management activities. Conversely, almost 50% anticipated at least some automation implementation over the next two years.

Backup issues are being identified at a corporate level, with more than 50% of backup professionals saying that their organizations are increasing funding into the sector, driving budget and headcount growth over the last few years.

In a positive sign, nearly half of those surveyed said backup operations are becoming more closely tied to cybersecurity operations, with greater integration between backup and cybersecurity tools.

The survey also dug into daily challenges professionals are dealing with regarding backups. Half of those surveyed identified concerns over complete asset protection, followed by protecting growing data volume and visibility into storage costs.

In backup management operations challenges, protecting data volume was identified as the top concern by 15%, behind securing backup data across applications at 17%. In third place, implementing cloud backup oversight came in at a close third on 14%.

“In essence, traditional backup operations challenges like environment heterogeneity and data volume growth are still pressing issues,” the report notes. “However, cloud backup oversight is now in the mix as well, a product of upcoming or in-progress cloud transformations.”

The report argues that a likely culprit behind many of these challenges is the lack of automation across backup management activities and the continued reliance on manual activities in increasingly complex environments.

With half saying that automation is coming, the top choice for automation is backup failure remediation at 54%. Some 47% cited the need for compliance and service-level agreement support, along with identifying unprotected assets, while 44% of those polled also mentioned creating backup failure incidents as an area of automation interest.

“Backup professionals will be expected to manage growing data volumes across cloud applications, adding to the already difficult task of managing backup application complexity,” the report concludes. “The inclusion of endpoint backups will only exacerbate the existing challenge to ensure that all data is completely backed up and protected from cybercriminals.”

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