Businesses facing a data protection emergency as backup strategies fail to keep up
Nearly eight out of ten (79 percent) of UK and Irish IT decision makers and professionals say there are gaps between their data dependency, backup frequency, SLAs and ability to get back to productive business.
The results of the Data protection Trends Report from Veeam Software also show that 76 percent of respondents admit falling prey to at least one ransomware attack in the past year, with 65 percent now using cloud services as part of their data protection strategy to increase resiliency.
In addition one in three organizations say that most or all of their backup repositories have been impacted as part of a ransomware attack. While companies report that 47 percent of data center servers, 50 percent of remote offices and 44 percent of cloud instances are impacted in an attack, paying the ransom is not a good recovery strategy. Nearly one in three (29 percent) of organizations who paid the ransom still couldn't recover their data. However, 22 percent of organizations could recover without paying any ransom due to having sufficient data protection.
Only 16 percent routinely test by restoring and testing functionality, meaning 84 percent rely on backup logs or media readability to assure recoverability. Just over half (52 percent) of organizations first restored to an isolated sandbox before recovering data after a ransomware attack.
Dan Middleton, vice president UK and Ireland at Veeam says:
While it's becoming increasingly common for 'production' to outpace 'protection,' the growing gap between what organizations expect and what IT is placed to deliver is worrying. Add in the fact that ransomware is almost a guaranteed threat that every organization must prepare for and we are clearly headed for a data protection emergency.
But what's more concerning is the effectiveness of attackers to proactively destroy their victim's data backup repositories. To protect your data, you need a secure, immutable backup in place as your last line of defense, and while IT departments are under pressure to cut costs, data protection budgets should never be reduced. It's a false economy to think you can save money on your data protection strategies. Instead, by investing wisely and taking a modern approach to data protection, you not only gain an advantage over attackers but also increase business resiliency which can give you the edge over competitors.
You can get the full report from the Veeam site.
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