On World Backup Day, overconfidence a worrying trend among organizations

World Backup Day is a stark reminder to organizations around the world on the importance of having sufficient and reliable backup solutions. With cybercriminals continuing to launch ransomware attacks on organizations, targeting their data and forcing them to fork out millions in ransom, backup is the best way to avoid this.

Over the year, companies that have sufficient backup capabilities have been able to deal with data breaches and avoid serious disruptions to their business. In fact, a new report from Acronis showed that 76% of organizations suffered downtime and data loss in 2021 alone, with system crashes, human error and cyberattacks the main cost of it.

The Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022, which is released in conjunction with World Backup Day also showed that 80% of organizations ran as many as 10 solutions simultaneously for data protection and cybersecurity. Yet more than half of them suffered downtime because of data loss. Clearly, more solutions do not translate into more protection.

According to the report, the trend is only getting worse this year. While 78% of organizations globally run as many as ten different solutions, 76% of organizations experienced downtime due to data loss, a 25% increase from 2021. As a result, 61% of global organizations’ IT teams now report a preference for integrated solutions that replace their complicated stacks of cybersecurity and data protection tools with a single, unified console.

In the Asia Pacific, more than half (52%) of local companies in China use between 6-10 different solutions while 19% of local companies use over 11 different ones. In Australia, almost one-fifth (19%) of companies use between 11-15 different solutions.

Meanwhile, local companies in India show some of the worst stats. 28.4% of companies use between 11-15 different solutions, and 9% of companies use over 15 solutions simultaneously.  South Korea ranks the best across APAC with exactly half of the local companies relying only on 1-5 different solutions simultaneously.

“As the entire world is increasingly at risk from different types of attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one solutions is the only way to achieve truly complete cyber protection. And that’s precisely the problem Acronis has set out to solve. Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so strong and reliable security is no longer an option, it’s a necessity,” says Candid Wuest, Acronis V.P. of Cyber Protection Research.

Overconfidence a trend on World Backup Day? 

A worrying trend discovered in the report also showed that despite 70% of organizations’ IT managers claiming to have automated patch management, only a handful of companies follow the 72-hour “golden time” for patch management. 82% also claim to have ransomware protection and remediation. Yet, successful attacks occur weekly and the size of ransom demands grows each year.

At the same time, 20% claimed to be testing backup restoration weekly but this is not consistent with any other industry-issued data. Acronis believes that IT managers are trying to appear better prepared than they are; but that is, in turn, misleading their managers, boards of directors, industry analysts, and customers.

“Our findings prove that organizations are spending more on IT security this year, but when we compare it to their overall IT budget, it becomes clear – organizations are still treating cyber protection as a “nice-to-have”, not as a “must-have”,” the report stated.

Moreover, despite the growing awareness around best backup practices, organizations around the world are still showing reluctance to use modern technologies and best practices, leaving companies more exposed to cyber threats.

Among the key reasons for slow adoption include the technology seems too complex or unnecessary. In South Korea, only 3% of local organizations use the recommended hybrid backup storage approach, while 42% of companies are still only using local storage. China proves to rank best among all APAC countries in terms of hybrid backup storage with 20% of organizations using both local and cloud storage.  India shows positive growth with 54% of local companies migrating to cloud storage, way ahead of the global average of 36%.

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