61% of Production Cloud Resources Lack Backups, Study of 53,709 Assets Finds

A study by cloud data protection firm Eon assessed 101,340 live resources across 78 companies' AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure environments in September 2026, identifying 53,709 as production-grade. Of those production resources, 61.2% had no backup policy, no recovery point, and no detectable native cloud snapshot. A key driver of the gap is tag-based backup tooling: roughly 66% of AWS production resources carried no environment tag, meaning standard coverage reports never counted them as unprotected — they simply went undetected. Notably, unprotected resources were on average older than protected ones, with a median age of 502 days, suggesting the problem is not a temporary backlog but a persistent blind spot. Only 0.9% of production resources had a documented exclusion justifying the lack of backup, leaving the vast majority with no policy and no recorded risk acceptance.