79% of IT leaders see a worrying ‘Protection Gap’

Nearly eight in ten (79%) of UKI IT decision makers and professionals disclosed gaps between their data dependency, backup frequency, SLAs and ability to get back to productive business when asked by researchers compiling the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022. Meanwhile, 76% of respondents admitted falling prey to at least one ransomware attack in the past year, with 65% now using cloud services as part of their data protection strategy to increase resiliency. Twenty percent of IT leaders polled say they will change backup solutions for cost reasons, while 23% are looking to improve results.

Attackers increasingly targeting backup repositories

Despite this, businesses are losing the battle when it comes to defending against ransomware attacks. EMEA data from the Veeam Ransomware Trends Report 2022 shows that 88% of ransomware attacks attempted to infect backup repositories to disable victims’ abilities to recover without paying the ransom, 75% of those attempts being successful. Furthermore, one in three organisations say that most or all of their backup repositories have been impacted as part of a ransomware attack.

While companies report that 47% of data centre servers, 50% of remote offices and 44% of cloud instances are impacted in an attack, paying the ransom is not a recovery strategy. Nearly one in three (29%) of organisations who paid the ransom still could not recover their data. However, 22% of organisations could recover without paying any ransom due to having sufficient data protection.  

Technologies for survival

Eighty four percent of organisations rely on backup logs or media readability to assure recoverability, meaning only 16% routinely test by restoring and testing functionality. However, just over half (52%) of organisations first restored to an isolated sandbox before recovering data after a ransomware attack.

“While it’s becoming increasingly common for ‘production’ to outpace ‘protection,’ the growing gap between what organisations expect and what IT is placed to deliver is worrying. Add in the fact that ransomware is almost a guaranteed threat that every organisation must prepare for and we are clearly headed for a data protection emergency,” said Dan Middleton, Vice President UK & Ireland, Veeam.

“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 defence, 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.”