Of the many things we’ve experienced in the last two years, a major development has been the explosion of cloud adoption. According to Gartner, global spending on public cloud services will exceed $480 billion in 2022. In the UK alone, the public cloud market generated $15 billion of revenue in 2021 and is projected to increase upwards to $23 billion by 2025.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the UK public sector has shown massive resilience with digital capabilities playing a critical role. Public services have adopted a myriad of digital technologies and SaaS applications to enable employees to work from anywhere, teams to collaborate, and citizens to access the essential services they require. For example, in Newcastle, technology was used to track how busy the city centre was in real-time to inform social distancing guidance. Such innovative uses of technology have been central to solving some of the pandemic’s trickiest dilemmas for city councils across the country.
New technologies, same problems
However, the pandemic has also exacerbated old problems like the exposure of unprotected cloud and SaaS data to ransomware attacks. Between 2020 and 2021, more than 80 percent of UK organisations experienced a ransomware attack, with security breaches costing UK enterprises an average of $3.88 million per breach. This represents a serious problem as the average remediation cost of a ransomware attack on UK enterprises is $840,000, higher than the global average of $761,000.
Specifically, cybercriminals have been setting their sights on the public sector. Take the ransomware attack on the UK’s Redcar and Cleveland Borough City Council for example, which shut down their IT services for three weeks and left them with a steep bill of over $19 million to repair the damages. Gloucester City Council recently faced a similar fate; a cyber attack in late December resulted in the compromise of their IT systems, which they’re saying could take months to restore.
Insufficient data protection exposes the UK public sector to cyber risk
Druva recently conducted Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in the UK and found that 77 percent of the non-National Health Service (NHS) public entities that responded have a cloud office suite in place. Specifically, 45 percent of those organisations have added at least one SaaS application since 2020. One organisation even noted that they had added over 50 SaaS applications over the same time period.
However, out of the 313 respondents who stated they use SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, only 40 percent confirmed there is a resilient system in place to back up their system separately. Despite significant numbers deploying cloud office suites and SaaS applications, most public bodies believe the backup of the data produced and held within these systems is the responsibility of the vendor.
The big disconnect
The idea that cloud and SaaS vendors are responsible for protecting your data is a common misconception among organisations. However, if you read the fine print within most service level agreements, you’ll find that cloud vendors offer limited to no data protection services. Most abide by a shared responsibility model in which the vendor is responsible for maintaining platform uptime while customers are responsible for the protection, resiliency, and long-term retention of data. Some refer to this as the “cloud trap” because without a comprehensive strategy leveraging a third-party data resiliency solution, organisations run the risk of data loss from malicious attacks or accidental deletion, increasing costs for managing data, and incurring compliance or audit penalties.
The benefits of a 100% SaaS-based data resiliency solution
With the pressures of the pandemic and a surge of ransomware attacks, data resiliency has increasingly taken centre stage. Modern platforms like the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud radically simplify data protection via a single platform spanning multiple geographies and clouds.
The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud’s built-in security framework and multi-layer approach is designed to be resilient against ransomware. Druva’s anomaly detection, pre-built SIEM and SOAR integrations, quarantine, restore scans with built-in AV plus customer-provided IOCs, as well as Druva Curated Recovery and Druva Rollback Actions, enable enterprises to reduce data loss, accelerate recovery, and strengthen their security framework.
Our next blog post in this series will uncover more findings from Druva’s Freedom of Information request. In the meantime, check out this eBook to learn more about Druva’s revolutionary approach to keeping business-critical data safe.