Acronis, the global leader in cyber protection, has released its annual Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022 for World Backup Day 2022 (that falls on 31st March 2022). This global report surveyed over 6,200 IT users and IT managers from small businesses to enterprises across 22 countries. This report give many interesting insights into companies cybersecurity sector, it exposes some of the most critical shortcomings appearing in cyber protection practices today. This report also examines why they are appearing and offers guidance on how they can be fixed.
Key finding from Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global Report
A key finding from Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2021 was that 80% of organisations ran as many as 10 different solutions for data protection and cybersecurity. Yet more than half of them suffered downtime due to data loss. From this scenario, it clearly showed that more solutions do not translate into more protection.
For 2022, this trend is getting worse. While 78% of organisations globally run as many as 10 different solutions, 76% of organisations experienced downtime due to data loss, a 25% increase from year 2021. This downtime came from a number of sources, including system crashes (52%), human error (42%), cyberattacks (36%) and insider attacks (20%).
As a result of the above findings and situations, 61% of global organisations 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.
“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,” says Candid Wuest, Acronis V.P. of Cyber Protection Research. “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.”
Overconfidence as a trend: IT teams are overselling their readiness
A worrying trend that came to light from this year’s report, that is responsible for cyber defences lowering and increasing IT security budgets:
- 70% of organizations’ IT managers claim to have automated patch management. However, based on any reliable industry research, 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.
- 20% claimed to be testing backup restoration weekly. Again, not consistent with any other industry-issued data.
From the report and insights, it may seem that IT managers are trying to appear better prepared than they are. However, the IT managers in turn are misleading their management, board of directors, industry analysts and customers.
However, if the overwhelming majority of those IT managers indeed have those solutions for cybersecurity and data protection on hand, they are not using them correctly. They just simply stocked their IT stacks with all of the recommended cybersecurity technologies – spending more money in vain.
Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global Report findings prove that organisations are spending more money on IT security for year 2022. However, when comparisons are made to their overall IT budget, it becomes clear that organisations are still treating cyber protection as a “nice-to-have” and not as a “Must-Have”
- Half of organizations globally allocate less than 10% of their overall IT budget on IT security.
- Only 23% of organizations globally are investing over 15% of their overall IT budget in security — even despite the increasingly threatening cyber landscape.
Pandemic-driven spike in awareness proves temporary
2 years of global pandemic (and still ongoing) forced the world to change the way we work and live. A hybrid work format was the norm, remote working or working from home. From frequent backups that were fuelled by the shift to remote work, it’s now over. From the findings, a third of IT managers only backup weekly, while another 25% back up monthly. The use of backup practices is declining across the board – only 15% of organisations IT teams adhere to them.
As compared to the 2021 findings (it’s the same as last year), 10% of IT managers still aren’t sure if their company is subject to any data privacy regulations. This just proves that IT managers, just like IT users, get stuck in their own ways.
According to Acronis research, 86% of organisations globally are also concerned about the threat of increasingly politically-driven cyberattacks caused by the worsening geopolitical climate. However, their concern does not translate into improvements to their cyber protection.
The key takeaway is the outdated approaches that professional IT teams have been using and relying on for years are now actively failing them in an increasing complex and demanding work environment, internet and social media world.
A comprehensive, easy-to-follow approach is essential to achieving a more reliable, holistic protection for data, applications and systems – one that combines cybersecurity, data protection and management into one solution.
Users show concern over cyberthreats, but backup habits remain unchanged
What are the backup habits like? From the findings, only 1 in 10 users backup daily, while 34% of users backup on a monthly basis. How many users rarely or never backup? A staggering 41% of users!
How many of them had to recover from a backup? 72% of users had to recover from a backup at least once in the past year, with 33% having to recover it more than once. All these mean that some of the users who chose not to backup have permanently lost their data:
- 43% of users update a week or more after an update release — of those, 7% take more than a month to perform these recommended updates. A decline in response time compared to 2021.
- While only 12% of users are following the recommended hybrid model of cloud and local backup storage, users have doubled down on cloud backup: for 4 years, we saw local backups shrinking from 62% in 2019 to 33% in 2022 — at the same time cloud backups jumped from 28% to 54%.
- 66% of users would not know or be able to tell if their data had been modified.
- 43% of users are not sure if their anti-malware solutions could protect against new and emerging cyberthreats.
Massive gap – Cyber protection in practice vs cyber protection in theory
From the above findings, insights and analysis from Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022, there is a massive gap between cyber protection in practice versus cyber protection in theory, now just in organisations, also among individuals.
Acronis provides a number of solutions that are able to bridge that gap — among them Acronis Cyber Protect, used by over 20,000 service providers to protect more than 750,000 businesses.
If you like to know and understand more in-depth about cybersecurity and data protection, as well as more global and regional insights, you can check out Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022 and the regional deep dives, on Acronis website where you can download the reports for free.
* Information and pictures courtesy of Acronis *