Companies Investing More Into Data Protection

According to a report, to achieve cyber resilience in the face of ongoing ransomware and cyberattacks, 92% of companies will increase their data protection spending in 2024. Even though companies are emphasizing the use of the cloud for larger recoveries, just a small percentage think they could recover from even a small crisis in less than a week. Cyberattacks continue to be the leading cause of disruptions. Cyberattacks were cited by companies as the most frequent and significant causes of business disruptions for the fourth year in a row. The fact that other disruptions, including infrastructure/networking, storage hardware, application software, public cloud resources, and server hardware, demonstrated the increasing need for updated backup strategies.

Bracing For Ransomware Impact

In the last 12 months, 76% of companies experienced at least one cyberattack. Even though the number is down from 85% in 2023, 26% of companies reported that they were being attacked at least four times in the previous year. According to the report, more companies experienced quarterly cyberattacks than those who maintained that they weren’t targeted at all. Recoveries remain a larger concern because just 13% of companies claimed they were able to successfully coordinate recoveries under DR scenarios. The largest obstacles to IT modernization and digital transformation initiatives, according to the survey, are protecting against cyber threats and achieving social, governmental, and environmental goals. Due to the amount of time and money being diverted from IT modernization or digital transformation, the variables scored higher than typical in challenges with skills, economic concerns, and organizational issues.

Most companies view cyber resiliency as a fundamental component of their larger business continuity or disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy; nevertheless, most service-level agreement (SLA) requirements aren’t yet being met by BC/DR readiness. Only 32% of companies thought their IT teams could recover 50 servers in 5 business days when asked how long it would take. There is a rising disparity between the expectations of data protection business units and the capabilities of IT services, as evidenced by additional supporting facts. Regarding their most recent extensive cyber/disaster test, 58% of the systems recovered per expectations.

Data Protection Budgets Expecting to Increase

Budgets for data protection are predicted to increase by 6.6% in 2024. The survey found that the growth in data protection spending will exceed the growth in IT spending for the second straight year. Companies believe that a modern data protection solution’s integration with cyber security tools is the most prevalent and crucial feature. The capacity to move a workload from one cloud to another and the uniformity of protection between on-premises workloads and IaaS/SaaS are among the features of current solutions that 41% of companies believe to be most significant. The largest threat to business continuity is still ransomware. It’s currently the leading source of outages and attempts to protect against are being hampered by the digital transition. Additionally, even though companies are spending more on protection, fewer than one-third of the companies think they can bounce back fast from a small attack. The results from this year’s report emphasize the necessity of ongoing cyber awareness and the necessity for all companies to make sure they have the right protection and recovery capabilities.

Container Usage Increasing

With 59% of companies using containers in production and another 37% either implementing or preparing to do so, container utilization continues to increase. However, only 25% of companies employ a backup solution designed specifically for containers; the remaining companies, on the other hand, merely backup a portion of the underlying components, including the database contents or storage repositories. In the event of a crisis or even a straightforward import/configuration problem that needs to be fixed, neither strategy guarantees that the apps and services will be resumable again. For data protection initiatives, the fact that 47% of companies stated they intended to look for a new job outside of their current company within the next year poses both a difficulty and an opportunity. Even though the market shift presents an opportunity to add knowledge to protect modern production workloads that reside in clouds, including Microsoft 365, Kubernetes containers, or other IaaS/PaaS deployments, losing valuable data protection talents can put companies at a major disadvantage when crises inevitably strike. For the second straight year, cloud-hosted workload protection (IaaS and SaaS) and dependability are the two most important considerations when it comes to “company backup” solutions. For companies using outdated datacenter-centric data protection solutions, this poses a challenge.

With companies moving workloads from one platform or cloud to another, IT teams that rely on outdated backup solutions that don’t provide fair protection for workloads hosted in the cloud will find it difficult to uphold service level agreements (SLAs) when companies shift workloads between platforms and clouds. This is especially true for those who use cloud-native services, including Microsoft 365/Salesforce (SaaS) or containers. At SpearTip, our cloud security assessments provide a picture of risks in the client’s cloud infrastructure along with remediation steps for each by focusing on security misconfigurations and deviations, including a review of account privileges and analysis of current logging details, from recommended cloud security architecture. Our cloud monitoring elevates companies’ cybersecurity posture with SaaS Application protection by gaining high-level insights with a unified cloud monitoring and alerting system. The protection safeguards various applications, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and email tenants, minimizing disruptions so companies can focus on running their business.

If your company is experiencing a breach, call our Security Operations Center at 833.997.7327 to speak directly with an engineer.