85% of organisations hit by ransomware in past 12 months: Report

Nearly 85 per cent of organisations were attacked by ransomware at least once in the past 12 months, up from 76 per cent, a report showed on Thursday.

Specifically, recovery is a main concern as organisations reported that only 55 per cent of their encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable from attacks, according to Veeam Software.

The survey found that companies are challenged with more complex hybrid IT environments and are raising budgets to fend off cyberattacks as well as keep up as production environments continue to diversify across various clouds.

Globally, organisations expect to increase their data protection budget in 2023 by 6.5 per cent.

Of the 85 per cent of organisations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3 per cent and often in concert with increased investments in cybersecurity tools.

"IT leaders are facing a dual challenge. They are building and supporting increasingly complex hybrid environments, while the volume and sophistication of cyber attacks is increasing," said Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam.

This is a major concern as leaders think through how they mitigate and recover business operations from any type of disruption.

"Legacy backup approaches won't address modern workloads - from IaaS and SaaS to containers - and result in an unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it's needed most. This is what's focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan," said Allan.

Due to its burden on budgets and manpower, ransomware and the current volatile cyber security landscape are taking priority for IT teams.

This is causing IT resources and budgets originally allocated towards Digital Transformation initiatives to pivot to cyber prevention.

"Not only do cyberattacks drain operational budgets from ransoms to recovery efforts, but they also reduce organisations' ability to modernise for their future success; instead, they must pay for prevention and mitigation of the status quo," said the report. (IANS)