Data protection remains a challenge for nearly 90% of organisations – report

A total of 89 per cent of organisations worldwide are not adequately securing data, and 88 per cent of IT leaders expect data protection expenditures to rise higher than overall IT spending as data becomes more vital to business success, a new report has revealed.

Meanwhile, 67 per cent of firms are turning to cloud-based solutions to protect their data, while the ability to recover data from ransomware attacks continue to drive business continuity strategies, according to the Data Protection Trends Report 2022 by Veeam Software. It surveyed over 3,000 IT decision-makers and global enterprises to understand their data protection strategies for the next 12 months and beyond.

The report also found that 80 per cent of UAE organisations and 82 per cent of Saudi organisations have a protection gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and how frequently data is backed up. On average, 17 per cent of UAE and 18 per cent of Saudi organisations’ data is left completely unprotected.

The ✨NEW ✨2022 Data Protection Trends report examines ? some of the latest trends in IT #dataprotection strategy—Check out the new blog by @Jbuff & @BackupDave’s for a look at the 2️⃣ most important questions in the survey >> https://t.co/romwurrtXu

— Veeam® Software (@Veeam) February 23, 2022

“Data growth over the past two years [since the pandemic] has more than doubled, in no small part to how we have embraced remote working and cloud-based services and so forth,” said Anand Eswaran, chief executive officer at Veeam.

“As data volumes have exploded, so too have the risks associated with data protection; ransomware being a prime example. This research shows that organisations recognise these challenges and are investing heavily, often due to having fallen short in delivering the protection users need. Businesses are losing ground as the modernisation of ‘production’ platforms is outpacing their modernisation of ‘protection’ methods and strategies. Data volumes and platform diversity will continue to rise, and the cyberthreat landscape will expand. So, CXOs must invest in a strategy that plugs the gaps they already have and keeps pace with rising data protection demands.”

According to the report, respondents also stated that their data protection capabilities could not keep pace with the demands of the business, with 89 per cent reporting a gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage versus how frequently data is backed up. This has risen by 13 per cent in the past 12 months, indicating that while data continues to grow in volume and importance, so do the challenges in protecting it to a satisfactory level. The key driver behind this is that the data protection challenges facing businesses are immense and increasingly diverse.

In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, 86 per cent and 84 per cent organisations respectively suffered ransomware attacks, making cyberattacks one of the single biggest causes of downtime for the second consecutive year. Per attack, organisations in UAE were unable to recover 34 per cent of their lost data on average, while Saudi firms were unable to recover 37 per cent.

Cyberattacks have been the single biggest cause of downtime, with 76 per cent of organisations reporting at least one ransomware event in the past 12 months. “As cyberattacks become increasingly sophisticated and even more difficult to prevent, backup and recovery solutions are essential foundations of any organisation’s modern data protection strategy,” said Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam.

To close the gap between data protection capabilities and this growing threat landscape, the report found that organisations will spend around 6 per cent more annually on data protection than broader IT investments. In the UAE and Saudi, 88 per cent and 86 per cent of organisations plan to increase their data protection budgets during 2022, the report stated.

Read: Protection, not cure, is the key to fending off ransomware criminals