Businesses unprepared to deal with ransomware

Ransomware attacks continue to impact organizations worldwide with high costs, but businesses are still largely unprepared to deal with them.

New data from Arcserve shows half of IT decision makers surveyed by Dimensional Research have been targeted by ransomware, 35 percent report their organizations were asked to pay over $100,000 in ransom payments, and 20 percent were asked to pay between $1 million to $10 million.

When asked about the confidence level in their IT team's ability to recover lost data in a ransomware attack, less than a quarter (23 percent) of those surveyed say they are very confident in their ability to recover lost data. Smaller businesses have even less confidence -- less than 20 percent are very confident in their ability to recover lost data in a ransomware attack.

There is recognition of the importance of continued investment to increase data resilience, 92 percent say they are making additional investments to protect against ransomware attacks. The top areas of investment are: security software (64 percent), training and certification (50 percent) and managed services (43 percent).

A strong disaster recovery strategy and updated backup systems are also seen as critical, 58 percent of respondents say they will rely on existing backups to restore operations as quickly as possible if a ransomware attack occurs.

"As our annual survey confirmed, ransomware attacks continue to significantly disrupt business worldwide with staggering costs and the real threat of losing mission-critical data," says Florian Malecki, executive vice president, marketing at Arcserve. "IT decision-makers must review and modernize their IT security infrastructure by making data backup and recovery and immutable storage a cornerstone of their data resilience strategy to strengthen the entire environment. Arcserve focuses on helping our customers achieve true data resilience with a Unified Data Protection approach of impenetrable and immutable best-in-class data protection solutions for data centers, cloud, and hybrid environments."

You can find out more on the Arcserve site.

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