Zerto releases results of its 2022 Ransomware Strategy Survey

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Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, today released the results of its 2022 Ransomware Strategy Survey conducted in August/September 2022 at VMware Explore US. The study uncovered gaps in organizations' privacy and ransomware strategies that they should address to reduce their risk of business disruption in the event of a ransomware attack.

 

Lack of focus on recovery puts business operations at risk in the face of ransomware attacks

 

As revealed in a recent IDC report sponsored by Zerto, the impact of ransomware attacks is far-reaching. The cost to people can be high as employee overtime, lost employee productivity, the direct cost of recovery (i.e. hiring consultants or specialists) and unrecoverable data are major issues. However, there are even more significant impacts such as lost revenue, damaged business reputation, and permanent loss of customers.

 

For this reason, cyber threats are part of the overall strategy of most organizations. However, the way organizations prepare to combat these threats varies. Only half of the companies surveyed focus on both recovery and prevention. This indicates that a holistic view of the respondents is far from the norm. Interestingly, over a third of respondents (37%) do not have a recovery-focused strategy. They either focus exclusively on prevention or, alarmingly, do not yet have a formalized strategy (8.7%). This is dangerous because the more ransomware actors are able to seize data, the more companies will suffer if they can't get back up and running immediately on their own behalf.

 

Creating a more holistic ransomware strategy

 

Ransomware can be combated with proper recovery strategies, but not all organizations have a formalized recovery strategy in place. The report shows that companies are reassessing their data protection and cyber resilience strategies. In the survey, 66.8% think their strategy needs to be reviewed; 20% are now satisfied with the existing plans.

 

Notably, two-thirds of respondents said they are reviewing their existing strategy, especially given the current cyber threat landscape. This can indicate that prevention is not enough and that conventional data protection is failing. As organizations re-evaluate their strategies, those who have not yet focused on recovery will benefit from moving toward continuous data protection, which provides a continuous stream of recovery checkpoints, allowing them to recover within seconds at a point in time an attack.

 

"In an era of relentless cyber threats, strategies to mitigate attacks cannot stand idle and must be multidimensional," said Caroline Seymour, VP of Product Marketing at Zerto. “Cyber ​​attackers have proven they can breach reinforced security structures, so organizations need to have a plan for what to do once malicious actors have gotten in. When the goal is to keep the business running, a recovery strategy is required. It's positive that many organizations have diverse strategies in place, but fully protecting the organization requires recovery capabilities.”