Four in every five (80%) of companies now run as many as 10 solutions simultaneously for their data protection and cybersecurity needs, yet more than half of those organisations suffered unexpected downtime last year because of data loss, according to the Cyber Protection Week survey by Acronis.
The survey covered 4,400 IT users and professionals in 22 countries across six continents.
“This year’s survey clearly illustrates that more solutions do not deliver greater protection, as using separate tools to address individual types of exposure is complicated, inefficient, and costly,” said Serguei Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis.
“These findings confirm our belief that the smarter approach is cyber protection, which unifies data protection, cybersecurity, and endpoint management in one,” said Beloussov.
Results showed that there is a significant gap in awareness among users and IT pros of what IT and cybersecurity capabilities are available to them, which can cause them to lose valuable time, money, and security.
More than two-thirds (68%) of IT users and 20% of IT professionals would not know if their data had been modified without their knowledge because their solution makes determining that kind of tampering difficult.
More than two-fifths (43%) of IT users don’t know if their anti-malware stops zero-day threats because their solution doesn’t make that information easily available.
One-tenth of IT pros don’t know if their organisation is subject to data privacy regulations. That ignorance puts the business at tremendous risk of major fines for potential compliance violations in 2021.
The survey also revealed the lax approach to data protection among IT users, with 83% of them spending more time on their devices last year, yet only half of them took extra steps to protect those devices.
One-third (33%) admit to not updating their devices until at least a week after being notified of a patch.
Nine-tenths (90%) of IT users reported performing backups, yet 73% have irretrievably lost data at least once, suggesting that they don’t know how to back up or recover properly.
To ensure that data is protected, Acronis recommends five simple steps — create backups of important data; update your operating systems and applications; avoid suspicious emails, links, and attachments; install antivirus, anti-malware, and anti-ransomware software; and consider adopting a single cyber protection solution.
