2026 Report:
AI Is Outrunning the Cloud
What's breaking in cloud backup under AI, multi-cloud, cost, and governance pressure
Five Paradoxes
Confidence and capability have come apart.
The full report shows where, why, and what it’s costing.
of executives are confident in their recovery. 56% had three or more recovery failures last year.
are confident they could survive a cyberattack. 80% of them already had a recovery failure last year.
97% of multi-cloud teams trust their cross-cloud restore. 84% had a recovery failure in the past 12 months.
say data is the biggest barrier to AI progress. Only 11% point to AI models or tooling.
are forced by cost to protect less data than they should. 87% of those same teams also retain data they don't need.
of executives are confident in their recovery. 56% had three or more recovery failures last year.
are confident they could survive a cyberattack. 80% of them already had a recovery failure last year.
97% of multi-cloud teams trust their cross-cloud restore. 84% had a recovery failure in the past 12 months.
say data is the biggest barrier to AI progress. Only 11% point to AI models or tooling.
are forced by cost to protect less data than they should. 87% of those same teams also retain data they don't need.
of executives are confident in their recovery. 56% had three or more recovery failures last year.
are confident they could survive a cyberattack. 80% of them already had a recovery failure last year.
97% of multi-cloud teams trust their cross-cloud restore. 84% had a recovery failure in the past 12 months.
say data is the biggest barrier to AI progress. Only 11% point to AI models or tooling.
are forced by cost to protect less data than they should. 87% of those same teams also retain data they don't need.
of executives are confident in their recovery. 56% had three or more recovery failures last year.
are confident they could survive a cyberattack. 80% of them already had a recovery failure last year.
97% of multi-cloud teams trust their cross-cloud restore. 84% had a recovery failure in the past 12 months.
say data is the biggest barrier to AI progress. Only 11% point to AI models or tooling.
are forced by cost to protect less data than they should. 87% of those same teams also retain data they don't need.
What’s breaking and why
AI is breaking data recovery & protection
78% of cloud IT leaders had a recovery failure last year. AI agents are deleting data inside production at machine speed. Hyperscaler outages are taking the recovery layer down with them.
AI is blocked by the data layer
The most valuable AI dataset most companies own is locked inside backup infrastructure built to protect data, not share it. So 75% are running AI on production instead, with all the risk that creates.
“
The biggest saving for us would be the removal of all the ETL pipelines.
— Senior DevOps Manager
AI is making cost cuts backfire
AI workloads are eating the budget that used to fund everything else, and backup is taking the hit. They're paying to store data they don't need and removing protection from data they do.
“
Our retention is six weeks. If we need something earlier than that, tough luck.
— Senior Manager, SRE & Cloud Engineering
AI is outpacing governance
AI agents are spinning up new resources faster than humans can tag them. Every governance failure mode scales with cloud sprawl. The teams running the most clouds are also the most confident they're not failing, and the most likely to find out the hard way.
“
We have over 1,200 accounts. There's nothing built in to give us visibility into backups across them.
— Director of Infrastructure Services
About the research
Eon commissioned independent research firm TrendCandy to survey 583 cloud IT leaders and managers in March 2026.
manager level or above
Major gaps are surfacing across the Infrastructure AI relies on. Let’s fix that.
