Businesses are unprepared for emerging threats

Organizations are failing to appreciate the growing challenges of protecting their data and, as a result, are experiencing the economic impact of data loss, according to EMC.

A new study of enterprise backup in 18 countries around the world, revealed that, while businesses have been successful in reducing the impact of the four biggest traditional data loss risks, they are unprepared for new, emerging threats, which are taking their toll instead.

Threats to protection data

Nearly a quarter (23%) of businesses surveyed had experienced data loss or unplanned systems disruption due to an external security breach and that number increased to over one third (36%) when taking internal breaches into account. Businesses are increasingly facing threats not just to their primary data, but also to their backup and protection data.

Whether combating cyber extortionists demanding cash to unlock data encrypted by ransomware, or other risks posed to backup and protection data, businesses need to find solutions that put their ‘data of last resort’ beyond harm’s reach.

Threats to data in the cloud

More than 80% of survey respondents indicated that their organizations will run at least part of eight key business applications2 in the public cloud in the next two years; yet less than half said they protect cloud data against corruption and less than half against deletion. More than half said they already run their email solution in the public cloud. And, overall, respondents already had, on average 30% of their IT environments based in the public cloud.

Because SaaS application providers often won’t protect against accidental loss or deletion by an employee, EMC believes it is critical for organizations to include cloud applications in their overall data protection strategies.

Evolving protection needs

More than 70% of organizations surveyed are not very confident they could fully recover their systems or data in the event of data loss or unexpected systems downtime. And confidence also suffers when it comes to data center performance, with 73% declaring they are not very confident their solutions will be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage.

“Our customers are facing a rapidly evolving data protection landscape on a number of fronts, whether it’s to protect modern cloud computing environments or to shield against devastating cyber attacks. Our research shows that many businesses are unaware of the potential impact and are failing to plan for them, which is a threat in itself,” said David Goulden, CEO, EMC Information Infrastructure.

from Help Net Security http://ift.tt/293ryzD

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