The cloud computing landscape is evolving at a breakneck pace, with the global cloud infrastructure market projected to reach $838 billion by 2034, and businesses are scaling rapidly to meet new demands. Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways.
These approaches often fall short in today's dynamic, multi-cloud landscape, where visibility, automation, and rapid recovery are essential. An Eon report reveals that cloud backups are still underestimated, viewed primarily as a failsafe — an out-of-sight last resort only for when things go wrong. But in today's fast-moving business world, cloud backups should be more than just a safety net. They can and should be a valuable business asset, empowering organizations to drive innovation, streamline operations, and ensure compliance with increasingly complex regulations. The shift to a more intelligent, dynamic backup strategy is not just an opportunity — it's essential for success.
Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup.
The Gaps: What's Holding Businesses Back?
One of the core issues we have found is that organizations are still overly reliant on outdated processes, tool fragmentation, and incomplete backup strategies. 38% of organizations still rely primarily on native snapshot or backup services from their cloud provider. While convenient, these tools often provide limited platform coverage, create vendor lock-in, and don't support granular or cross-cloud recovery. Tools like AWS Backup, Azure Backup, and Google Cloud's Backup for GKE offer native backup support, but they often fall short when it comes to cross-cloud visibility, policy consistency, and flexible, file-level recovery.
As environments become more dynamic and distributed, relying on a single provider's tools leaves critical data exposed. As many organizations view their future to be multi-cloud, there is a growing need for a single unified backup approach, ideally one that is built for visibility, has built-in, robust, and customizable automation features, and provides easy control across all platforms.
The challenges presented by fragmentation and a lack of control and automation are not poised to make operations more complicated; they already are. One in five organizations juggle multiple backup tools, resulting in policy drift and operational inefficiency. Meanwhile, 51% still rely on manual or semi-automated processes, which slow down recovery and increase the risk of failure or human error.
Alarmingly, there is an overwhelming lack of visibility within backups, leaving data exposed and at risk. We found that 39% of organizations have experienced cloud data loss or aren't confident in the integrity of their backups. Without full visibility, teams can't verify what's covered, what's exposed, or what's missing. Shadow resources, misconfigured storage, and untagged volumes slip through the cracks with increasing regularity in the fast-moving, multi-cloud environments that are becoming the norm. Gaps in discovery and classification are creating blind spots that compromise recovery when it counts most.
When recovery is needed, the systems in place make the process slow, inflexible, and expensive. Even teams that do test their restore workflows often uncover unexpected failures, like missing snapshots, misconfigured IAM roles, or dependencies that weren't documented.
54% of organizations cite compliance and data mismanagement as their top concerns, yet many rarely test their recovery workflows. Without improving their recovery methods and systems and regular validation, teams risk compliance failures, extended downtime, and rising costs every time recovery is needed.
Beyond the challenges of backups themselves, ransomware protection is still too thin for such an important asset, as with cloud ransomware growing, backups are a prime target. Yet 69% of organizations still lack layered protection, with many relying on a single line of defense or none at all.
Nearly one in four of all data loss cases is attributed to ransomware or data breaches. Without immutable storage, air gaps, anomaly detection, and automated recovery playbooks, even a minor incident can trigger major disruption.
Three Strategic Shifts Underway
Despite the gaps, we are seeing positive shifts taking place in how organizations are thinking about cloud backup. First and foremost, automation is slowly but surely gaining traction. Only 5% of organizations currently have fully automated backup strategies, but a promising 79% are investing or are planning to invest in overall backup improvements. The move towards automation is essential for improving recovery times, reducing human error, and ensuring that backup strategies remain consistent across diverse cloud environments.
Second, businesses are starting to realize that backup data can be far more than a recovery tool. In fact, 81% of IT leaders we surveyed see clear potential in transforming backups into centralized, queryable data lakes. These data lakes can serve as the foundation for high-impact use cases such as AI/ML, business intelligence, and compliance reporting. When backup data is accessible, dynamically organized, and integrated with business intelligence tools, it can power analytics and drive decision-making across the organization. Businesses have yet to take the leap to unlock this potential. Instead, backup data remains siloed, unclassified, and unused.
Organizations are increasingly exploring multi-cloud backup strategies to enhance resilience and reduce vendor lock-in, but this shift introduces new visibility and management complexity. Teams can't easily see what's protected, where gaps exist, or if policies are being enforced consistently.
That's why real-time, cross-cloud visibility isn't a luxury; it's a requirement. Without it, blind spots persist, recovery slows, and compliance risk increases. Solving for visibility means continuously discovering, classifying, and monitoring assets across every environment, as well as having a centralized way to oversee the full environment.
How to Modernize Cloud Data Backups
Organizations should start by regularly auditing and testing their backup posture. Begin with a comprehensive audit to identify blind spots, recovery gaps, and hidden risks, and continually reassess to ensure you're never caught off guard. A strong posture audit also prepares organizations for whatever comes next, whether that's a compliance check, a breach, or an outage.
Next, organizations need to recognize that more clouds shouldn't mean more backup tools. A unified platform of consolidated, integrated tools built for hybrid and multi-cloud environments simplifies management, improves visibility, and helps maintain consistent policies. Automating discovery and policy enforcement processes will ensure that new resources are found and protected in real-time, and automating policy enforcement ensures consistent and compliant coverage.
Companies must also adopt cloud-first ransomware protections. Ransomware threats are only gaining speed, and cloud backups are a prime target. Cloud-native platforms provide building blocks such as object lock and versioning. However, organizations still need to architect layered ransomware protection strategies that incorporate elements like immutable storage, anomaly detection, air gaps, and recovery playbooks.
Finally, organizations must reimagine their backups beyond mere "insurance." By organizing backup data into a structured, queryable lake, teams can enable analytics, accelerate compliance audits, support AI/ML, and streamline migrations. It's as much of a mindset shift as a technical one.
A Sunnier Future for the Cloud
The gaps in traditional backup strategies are clear, but so too are the opportunities for businesses that prioritize modern backup posture management. By embracing automation, unlocking the value of backup data, and investing in a multi-cloud, centralized management approach, companies can turn their backup strategies into a competitive advantage, reducing downtime, enabling faster compliance audits, and unlocking backup data for analytics and AI workloads.