Businesses should be able to recover from ransomware attacks

Research conducted by Zerto has highlighted the prevalence of skills shortages and reliance on internal resources to increase the risk of mitigation strategies. While businesses recognize that recovering from an attack is one of the effective ways to defend against ransomware attacks. But many businesses are still struggling with ransomware when prevention fails.

A study conducted by ESG shows that the frequency and impact of ransomware attacks remain a major concern. In fact, nearly 75% of businesses have been negatively impacted by a ransomware attack in the past 12 months (73% of respondents in total).

Even among the most advanced organizations (ranked as a “leader” in preventing ransomware attacks by ESG), 75% experienced operational disruptions, raising questions that those with a proven defense strategy may not have the complete recovery strategy. The inadequacy of recovery strategies proved even worse for victims. Nearly 61% of victims experienced further extortion after paying the ransom. Caused them to add an additional payout on top of the initial ransom.

The study further highlighted the risks associated with paying the ransom, with only 14% of respondents (one in seven) getting 100% of the data even after accepting the ransom demand. This goes to show that paying the ransom does not guarantee a full business return to normal.

Skill issues affecting attack response and resilience

Despite the volume and impact of attacks, 45% of respondents are still struggling with skills that will help them respond to ransomware attacks. In particular, they also revealed that their teams have gaps in skills and training in some areas compared to outside contractors/vendors, while others are severely lacking in critical people and skills.

“Unfortunately, many businesses are still significantly inadequate in effectively mitigating the risk and impact of ransomware attacks,” commented Christophe Bertrand, ESG practice director. “This has led a significant number of people to conclude that they have no choice but to pay the ransom in the hope that their data will be returned. Instead, leaders should focus on ransomware tactics that emphasize effective, fast and full recovery.”

Caroline Seymour, VP of Product Marketing at Zerto, said: “It is worrying that many businesses are experiencing an attack storm driven by insufficient technology and under-resourced teams.

The data is clear: The number and severity of ransomware attacks are growing. Paying the ransom is no longer a guarantee of data recovery, nor should it be. Businesses need a data protection solution that can recover in minutes to the state they were in seconds before the attack. Since the question is no longer a question of whether to do it, but when to start doing it, businesses need to double down on data protection and recovery.

Conclusion

Today, businesses of all sizes across all industries face the growing threat of ransomware attacks. Storage systems may seem to have little to do with an organization’s cybersecurity posture and policies, but it just might be the best defense. Some features and components of virtual machine backup, such as easy-to-manage, cost-effective, and storage-friendly, make it essential to protect sensitive data from ransomware attacks, helping to create unbreakable cloud storage for enterprise data centers and effectively prevent ransomware attack. Most common used VM backup solution includes VMware Backup, Xenserver Backup, oVirt Backup and so on.

Exit mobile version