The corona pandemic has ensured that data is increasing even more rapidly. In addition, IT is becoming more and more complex, not least because of the large number of employees working from home. Data security in companies has not kept pace with either of these developments.
The exploding amount of data poses a severe problem for IT departments. Categorizing the flood of data promptly and securing it appropriately becomes a real challenge. Without reason, data backup should be given high priority in companies. Because the Data Protection Trends Report 2022 by the data security expert Veeam shows that attackers are using increasingly sophisticated methods that are difficult to prevent and can cause significant damage to the companies concerned. Therefore, efficient backup and recovery solutions should be a mainstay of a modern data protection strategy in the company. But the reality often looks different.
Cyber Attacks Hit Every Company Sooner Or Later
Cyber attacks are now a pervasive threat to businesses. In the report, three-quarters of the 3,000 companies surveyed worldwide said they had been the target of a ransomware attack at least once in the past 12 months. Another alarming number: Four out of ten all physical servers worldwide experience at least one failure every year. As in the previous year, cyber-attacks were the most common cause of downtime in the past year. Today, the question is no longer whether a cyber attack will occur but when it will occur. On average, organizations could not recover 36 percent of data encrypted by ransomware. And while data backup should be a fundamental part of any data protection strategy,
The numbers show that today’s data protection strategies cannot always prevent ransomware attacks or mitigate the consequences. Data backups have long been considered a potent remedy against failures caused by ransomware. This is no longer trivial today, as attackers target backup data increasingly. An encrypted backup is useless. Businesses need to ensure that backups are designed to provide a successful recovery. Backups alone are no longer enough. They cannot be carried out every hour or even more frequently, as this would sometimes slow down the entire operation. Instead, backups should be combined with snapshots and replication.
Data Backups In The Cloud Are Catching On
Data growth has more than doubled during the Covid19 pandemic. This is also because companies have relied heavily on home offices and cloud-based services. In addition, problems in the supply chains have hampered the implementation of new on-premises IT systems and, at the same time, fueled the implementation of cloud initiatives.
As the number of data increases, so do the challenges of adequately protecting this data. The migration of resources to the cloud helped a little but, at the same time, increased the complexity of the workloads and the effort involved in administration. Data backups have to meet significantly more requirements today than a few years ago.
The cloud has become indispensable as a data platform today. According to the Veeam report, two-thirds of companies use cloud services as part of their data protection strategy. Backup and restoration are two sides of the same coin. For example, 21 percent of the companies surveyed perform recovery on their premises, but 71 percent implement it in various forms in the cloud.
Many organizations experience a gap between the speed at which they can recover applications and the rate at which they need to recover applications and restore employee productivity. Enterprises are lagging in data protection and continue to lose ground as the modernization of production platforms outpaces protection methods and strategies. Therefore, companies must establish a new system that keeps up with the increasing demands.
Strategies For Efficient Data Backup
It’s all about ensuring that data is protected and recoverable in a ransomware attack. One way to achieve this goal is to work with a specialized and experienced third party and invest in an automated and orchestrated solution. Advanced techniques such as cloud services, containers, and computerized backups allow administrators to cope with the increased demands. Factors driving technical change in the data backup sector are qualitative improvements in reliability, the frequency of data backups, and agile recovery methods. Four out of five companies assume that.
Therefore, the ability to protect cloud-delivered workloads is a crucial purchase criterion for enterprise data protection. IaaS and SaaS capabilities are the defining attributes of Modern Data Protection. Investing in modern data protection goes beyond ensuring business continuity and customer trust. Respondents to the report expect their organization’s data protection budget—that is, backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery—to grow in 2022.
In summary, the advice to businesses is:
- Prepare your data backup arrangements.
- Assume that they will be breached with cyber attacks and prepare the recovery processes.
- Practice these to get back up and running quickly after an attack.
Also Read: In The Age Of Ransomware, Do Companies Need A Security Rating?
