Infrequent backups and insufficient testing - a cybercriminal's dream

According to new Zerto research, a significant number of organisations do not back up their data or test their businesses continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities with enough frequency. As such, businesses across the world are introducing the risk of disruption and data loss in a world expecting 24/7 availability. 

New Research Indicates Business Are Concerned with an Upsurge in Criminal Activity 

• With ransomware attacks on the rise, 56% of self-identified end users said they are re-evaluating their disaster recovery, backup and cyber resilience strategy and tools.

• Looking further into the findings, 62% said that they are still using traditional backup tools which poses an ever-present danger in recovery in the event of an attack. This comes at a time when replication technology, specifically Continuous Data Protection (CDP) can deliver point-in-time recoverability in a non-disruptive manner instead of backup copies burdening production environments. 

The IDC State of IT Resilience Report, also commissioned by Zerto, noted that companies pay a high financial and reputational cost for downtime caused by ransomware and other cyber threats. It reveals that 37% of respondents experienced a direct loss of revenue, 61% suffered damage to company reputation and 26% indicated a permanent loss of customers, reinforcing the need to find a solution that mitigates the risk and reduces the impact of downtime caused by cyberattacks. 

Protection Gaps and Infrequent Testing Lead to Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities 

• Two in five businesses stated that they back up their data every 12 hours or even less frequently—with 17% leaving a gap of more than 24 hours between backup copies creating potentially significant data loss in the event of an attack.

• Sixty-four percent of end-users only test their BC/DR scenarios and recoverability on an annual or quarterly basis. This lack of testing means businesses are missing opportunities to reevaluate and adapt their BC/DR strategies so that they and their customers are protected from all types of disruptions and disasters. Frequent testing of BC/DR plans help ensure IT resilience and enables businesses to recover quickly if they fall victim to a cyberattack like ransomware. 

“The combination of infrequent data backups and lapsed BC/DR capability testing within an organisation is a cybercriminal’s dream,” explains Caroline Seymour, vice president, product marketing at Zerto. “If a company suffers a ransomware attack and cannot recover quickly, then the cybercriminal has full control of the situation. The company must either pay or accept that it is going to be offline for a significant amount of time. By contrast, if an organisation has deployed a CDP solution, it can almost instantaneously recover to a point-in-time before the attack—and remove any leverage that cybercriminals may have.”