Cohesity Survey Reveals Appetite for Data Management as a Service

A new Cohesity data management as a service (DMaaS) market study finds that mid-to-large enterprises are hungry for DMaaS. But that’s not enough. One-trick pony offerings are a turnoff, the study revealed. Additionally, businesses want choice in how to manage their company data.

Cohesity defines a DMaaS solution as providing the following via a single vendor: backup and recovery, disaster recovery, archiving, file and object services, dev/test provisioning, data governance and security.

A few key points rose to the top in the Cohesity report — “Data Management as a Service: A Comprehensive Market Study.” The survey looked at how IT decision makers are thinking about data management as they head into 2021. Five-hundred IT decision makers in the U.S. comprised the survey. One-half of respondents were from midsize companies ($100 million-$1 billion in revenue). The other 250 respondents were from enterprise organizations (more than $1 billion in revenue). Vanson Bourne conducted the survey for Cohesity.

The benefits of DMaaS, Cohesity says, are clear. They include reducing the in-house burden to manage data infrastructure, cost predictability, scaling on demand, tools that better enable midsize firms to compete against larger companies, and accessing cloud-based apps and services to get additional value from data.

In fact, 89% of survey respondents see DMaaS as an attractive option. Among midsize organizations, 91% see major benefits in DMaaS. That’s no surprise, as mass data fragmentation burdens IT teams. Tech pros say they spend about 40% of their time weekly on installing, maintaining and managing data infrastructure. Another way of looking at that time suck? It’s about 16 hours per week or five months per year.

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Reluctance to DMaaS comes in a couple of forms. For starters, companies want control of their data destinies. Additionally, survey respondents lament single-function SaaS offerings that necessitate working with multiple vendors. That’s unappealing on many levels.

Ninety-four percent of IT decision makers are not interested in single-function DMaaS solutions. Also, 70% cite concerns about having to procure services from multiple vendors to completely manage their data. Survey respondents worry that working with multiple vendors will increase workloads and budgets, and lead to data fragmentation.

A second concern, and a critical one, is the safety of the company’s crown jewels. Sixty-nine percent of respondents want choice in managing their company’s data.

“We will not consider vendors that just offer a data-management-as-a-service model, as we also want the option to manage some data directly,” respondents say.

Sixty-seven percent of midsize firms and 71% of enterprise firms expressed this sentiment.

In October, Cohesity and AWS announced a strategic relationship to deliver DMaaS. AWS made an equity investment in Cohesity.