Analyst Research Says Most Aren’t Prepared For Ransomware — Are You?

Data protection is one of those enterprise technologies that, by design, you shouldn’t hear about very often. At its best, such services are continuously running in the background, quietly doing their job and ready at a moment’s notice when disaster finally strikes. Most often, and seemingly increasingly, we hear the stories about when they fail — when data is lost, operations are shut down for days while partial recoveries are attempted, or when ransoms are being paid to cyber criminals to retrieve critical data.

These latter scenarios are every IT department’s worst nightmare, often the sort of thing that keeps leaders, and even company executives, up at night. IT leaders are often persuaded to buy extra or redundant services to make sure their company is prepared for such an eventuality. But when push comes to shove, are these leaders and their systems ready?

According to IDC research that we commissioned¹, the answer is clearly no. 

IDC research: Most organizations aren’t prepared for ransomware, are you?

When data is spread across hybrid, cloud, and edge environments, data resiliency becomes much more complicated. While IT leaders think they have checked all the boxes, our new survey data reveals the contradictions of hopes versus reality. 

For example, while 92% of respondents stated that their data resiliency tools were efficient or highly efficient, 67% of those hit by ransomware were forced to pay, and nearly 50% experienced data loss. 

No one is arguing that organizations don’t take cybersecurity seriously or place a premium on data resiliency — in fact, 77% of respondents stated that data resiliency was in their top three IT priorities. Additionally, 85% of respondents indicated they have a formal cyber recovery playbook while only 7.7% believe their current data resiliency efforts are “only partially efficient or inefficient.”

The problem is when practice is put into real world situations. Five concerns (FIVE!) all rose to the top level for IT leaders after a ransomware attack and directly contradict the idea that they’re prepared: 

• Inability to recover encrypted or deleted data without paying a ransom
• Loss of data
• Inability to recover in a timely manner
• Inadequate data protection and recovery capabilities
• Loss of productivity or revenue

Being the target of a ransomware attack is almost unavoidable at this point (nearly half of survey respondents said they had been successfully attacked in the last three years), but for the vast majority of organizations that claim they are prepared, their readiness and recovery when ransomware attacks occur are rather concerning. In addition to the data loss mentioned above, 76% experienced reinfection following recovery from the initial attack. 

This begs the question, how can you best prepare and protect your critical data? 

Download the free IDC white paper to get recommendations for ransomware recovery and data resiliency best practices

Read the full IDC white paper and download the infographic to understand the gap in IT leaders’ responses to cyber threats, as well as explore IDC’s recommendations to recover clean data, mitigate damage, and get mission-critical systems up and running quickly following a breach.

Closing the gaps in today’s ineffective ransomware defenses 

It’s clear the human element will always hold us back to some degree. While the majority of surveyed IT leaders felt they had a highly effective system, they clearly understand there is room for improvement. The No. 1 desire from survey respondents was for fully automated and non-disruptive infrastructure updates. The No. 2 ask was for greater automation and recovery orchestration from ransomware, specifically automation to find the most recent recovery point.

The only way we can begin to fight cyber attacks and data loss is by relying on products that leverage increasingly intelligent machine learning and automation enable IT leaders to react faster, mitigate the impact of attacks, and increase overall business resilience. In building automated systems, nothing matches the cloud’s pure scale and compute capability. 

Air-tight cyber defense and seamless ransomware recovery with Druva

As the leading solution built entirely in the cloud and able to leverage its full capabilities, Druva is designed to simplify your approach to data resiliency. Druva’s Curated Recovery feature automatically identifies the latest clean version of each file, replacing a weeks-long process. With an intelligent platform, IT teams accelerate recovery and return operations to normal faster. This enables your team to:

• Prevent data loss with point-in-time recovery to get the most recent, clean data from the entire time frame of an attack
• Automate incident response, prevent reinfection, and empower forensics with SOAR integrations
• Automatically consolidate the best version of each file into a single “Golden Snapshot” to ensure a speedy recovery and limit downtime

Visit the ransomware recovery page of the Druva site to learn more, and discover Druva’s Data Resiliency Guarantee — the industry’s only guarantee of data protection against five key threats — up to $10 million.

¹ IDC White Paper, sponsored by Druva, “You Think Ransomware Is Your Only Problem? Think Again,” doc #US49628322, September 2022.