In accordance with the World Cyber Protection Week, Acronis has revealed that a whopping 42% of companies had their data loss due to downtime due to not backing up daily which only 41% out of the total 90% backers did. The survey is participated annually by nearly 3000 people which unveils the protection habits of users around the world.
The highlight of the report has some numbers that seem unreal in a digital era but these are credible figures unfortunately which include:
- 91% did backup stuff, but 68% still lose them from accidental deletion, hardware or software failure, or an out-of-date backup
- Only 15% of organizations backup multiple times per day
- 26% back up daily, 28% back up weekly, 20% back up monthly, and 10% aren’t backing up at all and half of that 10 % believe backups aren’t necessary
- Only 17% of personal users and 20% of IT professionals follow best practices, employing hybrid backups on local media and in the cloud
- 88% of IT professionals are concerned with ransomware, specifically 86% on cryptojacking, 87% on social engineering attacks like phishing, and 91% on data breaches while personal users rose by 33% compared to last year’s figure
- 30% of personal users and 12% of IT professionals wouldn’t know if their data was modified unexpectedly or if anti-malware are good against zero-day exploits.
- 9% of organizations reported that they didn’t know if they experienced downtime as a result of data loss this year
It is important to uphold the 5 Vectors of Cyber Protection that focus on safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security (SAPAS) for all data, applications, and systems. Cyberattacks could hold fewer threats against individuals or organizations if backups are available to replace lost data.
Add these to your to-do list from now on
While still within the topics of backups, the main concern is that cyberattacks are one of the main reasons why redundancy needed to exist in the first place. Data and information hold so much value on top of the responsibilities of owning them that losing or leaking a portion of them would lead to unexpected consequences that might even involve lawmakers (Take that Zuckerberg). Here are some simple ideas for protecting them in an efficient way:
- Always create backups according to the 3-2-1 ruleset. The 3 denotes one current and two backup copies. The 2 denotes two forms of storage, normally one physical disk and another soft copy within on-demand access location such as a NAS. The 1 denotes an offsite copy that is less likely to suffer damage such as cloud or remote location.
- Patch all operating systems and applications to the latest versions. Bug fixes and security vulnerabilities are often solved with each incremental update so be sure to enable Auto Update if programs are allowed to do so to minimize zero-day exploits.
- Check emails, links or attachments thoroughly before accessing. This is especially important when operating internal devices that have access to organizational intranets which hackers either phish or social engineer malicious items to gain credential and root access.
- Install anti-virus, anti-malware, and anti-ransomware protection. A pretty straightforward yet effective move and vendors usually push automatic updates on a daily basis too.
- Integrate complete solutions. They should all contain a full security suite, vulnerability assessment like a penetration test and patch fixes that prioritizes ease of use, reliability, and efficiency.
If you are interested in backing up files onto a secure cloud, try out Acronis Cyber Files Cloud for free now as we have previously reported. In the meantime, find out what’s the deal about World Cyber Protection Week is about here. More of a statistical guy? Check out the survey result in full instead.
