Businesses modernize IT production because it enables them to be more productive. But often, as they go about modernizing their production environment, they are forced to recognize that they are using inadequate approaches to protect the data in it.

This year's “production-centric” IT modernization priorities that were most frequently cited by ESG research survey respondents are all clearly noble, logical ways to improve the productivity of a business. But for midsized organizations especially, the collective impact of those priorities on the IT infrastructure can be significant. Thus, many organizations are finding themselves prioritizing efforts to modernize their data protection solutions in addition to updating their production platforms and workloads.