Australian orgs face mounting threats of data loss

Australian organisations are gambling with how much data they can afford to lose following a cyber attack, according to new research from Veeam.

The company’s annual 2022 Data Protection Trends report found that 93% of Australian organisations have a gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and the frequency of their data backups.

This is an increase of 20% over the past year, in a result which Veeam said paints a picture of organisations struggling to keep up with a surge in data growth, as well as the move to cloud-based services in support of remote working. This is leaving some organisations more vulnerable to attack.

On average, Australian organisations cited a loss of 38% of their data per cyber attack, the report found. Perhaps even more worrying, ransomware caused outages at an estimated 84% of Australian organisations during 2021, the report states.

Nearly all (99%) Australian organisations experienced unexpected outages in the past 12 months and 96% reported having an availability gap between their SLAs and how quickly they can return to productivity.

In response to the growing risk, 92% of Australian organisations meanwhile plan to increase their data protection spend by an average of 6% more than the prior year.

“Data growth over the past two years [since the pandemic] has more than doubled, in no small part to how we have embraced remote working and cloud-based services and so forth,” said Anand Eswaran, Chief Executive Officer at Veeam.

“As data volumes have exploded, so too have the risks associated with data protection; ransomware being a prime example. This research shows that organisations recognise these challenges and are investing heavily, often due to having fallen short in delivering the protection users need,” he said.

Eswaran added that businesses must seek to ensure that modernisation of their security methods and strategies keeps pace with modernisation of their operational systems.

“Data volumes and platform diversity will continue to rise, and the cyber-threat landscape will expand. So, CXOs must invest in a strategy that plugs the gaps they already have and keeps pace with rising data protection demands,” he said.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/andranik123