2025 State of Cloud Backup: Where Enterprises Fall Short and How to Catch Up

Cloud adoption is accelerating, with the global cloud infrastructure market projected to reach $838 billion by 2034. Yet many backup strategies remain outdated, fragmented, and costly, leaving companies vulnerable to data loss, compliance risks, and missed business opportunities.

Based on insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at Google Cloud Next, the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup report reveals where backup strategies are breaking down—and where forward-thinking teams are already adapting.

This overview shares key findings to help you identify Cloud Backup Posture Management (CBPM) gaps, benchmark your approach, and take steps toward a more resilient, intelligent backup strategy.

Whether you’re a CIO, CISO, platform engineer, cloud architect, or IT manager, this summary is designed to help you take action.

Four Backup Posture Gaps to Fix Now

1. Outdated Processes, Tool Fragmentation, and Incomplete Backup Strategies

Despite rapid advances in cloud infrastructure, 38% of organizations still rely on basic disaster recovery (DR) tools provided by their cloud provider, or have no formal backup strategy in place at all. While provider-native tools offer convenience, they come with trade-offs: limited platform coverage, high recovery costs, vendor lock-in, and rigid, snapshot-based recovery.

As environments become more dynamic and distributed, relying on a single provider’s tools leaves critical data exposed. The future is multi-cloud. Organizations need one unified backup approach—built for visibility, automation, and control across platforms.

Fragmentation makes things worse. 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.

2. Poor Visibility Leaves Data at Risk

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—especially in fast-moving, multi-cloud environments. Gaps in discovery and classification create blind spots that compromise recovery when it counts most.

3. Recovery Remains Slow, Inflexible, and Costly

54% of organizations cite compliance and data mismanagement as their top concerns—yet many still rely on full snapshot restores and rarely test their recovery workflows.

Legacy methods slow everything down. Pulling entire volumes just to recover a single file incurs cloud storage charges and prolongs the recovery time. Without granular restore options and regular validation, teams risk compliance failures, extended downtime, and rising costs every time recovery is needed.

4. Ransomware Protection Is Still Too Thin

Cloud ransomware is growing fast, and 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 Already Underway

While our report primarily highlights the vast and growing gap between cloud acceleration and cloud backups, it also reveals the trends and strategies that professionals are already adopting to create a better future for cloud backups.

1. Automation Is Picking Up—But Most Teams Aren’t There Yet

Only 5% of organizations report having a fully automated cloud backup posture, despite 79% investing in overall backup improvements. That momentum is promising, but most teams are still stuck at the surface level.

Real automation isn’t about scripts and scheduled jobs. It’s about real-time discovery, automatic classification, and continuous policy enforcement across platforms. Without that, teams remain reactive, and risks go unchecked.

In today’s environments, automation is more than just a time-saver—it’s a strategic imperative.

2. Backup Is Emerging a Queryable, Intelligent Data Lake

Backups aren’t just for recovery anymore. As AI and analytics initiatives gain momentum, more organizations are realizing that backup data can be a powerful asset.

81% of IT leaders in our survey see potential in transforming backups into centralized, queryable data lakes.

And we’re hearing the same from our customers: forward-looking teams want to unlock backup data for analytics, compliance audits, AI/ML pipelines, and cloud migrations.

This isn’t yet a widespread practice, but it’s quickly becoming a business requirement. The need to access more of your enterprise data is growing fast, and backup is one of the largest—and most overlooked—sources. The opportunity is clear. The challenge lies in execution.

3. Multi-Cloud Demands Real-Time Visibility

Multi-cloud backup strategies boost flexibility and resilience—but they also increase complexity. As environments span providers, visibility breaks down. 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 baseline 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. 

Take Action: Steps to Modernize Your Cloud Data Backup

Based on our report, here are the key steps organizations can take now to build smarter, more resilient cloud backups:

1. Audit and Test Your Backup Posture—Regularly

Begin with a comprehensive audit to identify blind spots, recovery gaps, and hidden risks. A strong posture audit also prepares you for whatever comes next—whether that’s a compliance check, a breach, or an outage.

Don’t stop there. Recovery testing should be routine.

2. Consolidate Tools for Better Visibility

More clouds shouldn’t mean more backup tools. A unified platform—built for hybrid and multi-cloud—simplifies management, improves visibility, and helps keep policies consistent.

3. Automate Discovery and Policy Enforcement

Automating discovery ensures that new resources are found and protected in real-time. Automating policy enforcement ensures consistent and compliant coverage.

4. Implement Cloud-First Ransomware Protections

Ransomware isn’t slowing down—and cloud backups are a prime target. Air-gapped, immutable storage, anomaly detection, and automated recovery workflows form a layered defense that helps teams stay ready.

5. Leverage Backup as an AI-Ready Data Asset

Backups shouldn’t be locked away for safekeeping—they should be put to work.

By organizing backup data into a structured, queryable lake, teams can enable analytics, accelerate compliance audits, support AI/ML, and streamline migrations. It’s not just a shift in storage—it’s a shift in mindset.

Backup Isn’t Just a Safety Net Anymore

Your backup posture reflects your cloud maturity. With the right strategy, it can become a driver of resilience, compliance, and innovation.

Yes, the gaps are real—and so is the momentum. Teams are already moving toward smarter, more dynamic backup architectures.

The full 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup report goes deeper, with data, frameworks, and next steps for cloud-forward IT teams.

Download the full report and take the next step toward smarter cloud resilience.