Winning organizations in the digital transformation (DX) era will be those that collaborate most effectively between business units and IT. IDC estimates that investors will use platforms/ecosystems, data value, and customer engagement metrics for all enterprises by 2020. This means that organizations that work to transform their IT organization to digital native will have a measurable advantage over those that do not. Thus IT investments will be driven by the ability to create demonstrable business value in a digital economy. Business value will not be measured just by ROI but by the ability to deliver faster application deployment with less human intervention, a better user experience, and simpler operations.

In alignment with digital transformation, we estimate that more than 70% of organizations have a cloud-first application deployment strategy. High among the cloud-first initiatives for many organizations is a transition to Microsoft Office 365 and utilizing public clouds such as Microsoft Azure. However, in this transition, IT leaders are discovering that default data protection schemes are not as robust as they desire. As a result, many are turning to companies such as Veeam to provide the necessary data management and protection policies demanded by the organization.