IT decision makers: WFH exposes organisations to more cyber-attacks

Most IT decision-makers across the globe lack confidence in their organisations strength against cyber-attacks, a study by Dell Technologies has found.

The latest Global Data Protection Index by Dell highlights that confidence in data protection capabilities that measure up to internal and external standards is low. What’s more concerning is that many of the IT decision-makers interviewed believe that their organisation will experience a disruptive event in the next year (64%).

Not only do cyber-attacks affect data security, but can also cost the company financially in data loss and system downtime – $959,493 is the average cost of data loss in the 12 months before the report, and $513,067 is the average cost of unplanned systems downtime in the last year.

Working from home is considered a significant addition to cyber security vulnerability in organisations, with 74% agreeing that their organisation has increased exposure to data loss from cyber threats with the growth of employees working from home. Additionally, 62% are concerned that their organisations existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats.

Consistent with 2018 and 2019, interviewees in 2021 lacked confidence that they would be able to recover all business critical data should a destructive cyber-attack occur.

Another issue for IT decision-makers is the increasing introduction of new and emerging technologies within their organisation. SaaS applications, Cloud, Artificial intelligence, and IoT are just a few of the new technologies that interviewees lacked confidence in their protection.

This is because emerging technologies are seen as a risk to data protection, particularly to those using multiple protection vendors, according to Dell.

Dell recommends organisations “ensure that their data protection infrastructure supports these technologies.”

“Organisations need to ensure they have specific solutions in place to protect data in multi-cloud and virtualised workloads, as some organisations still believe their cloud providers are responsible for this.” Cloud is particularly is it “plays an important role in disaster recovery and long-term retention strategies.”

Additionally, “organisations which are using a single data protection vendor are less likely to have experienced data loss, data access issues, and unplanned systems downtime incidents in the past year than those using multiple vendors.”

“Those using a single vendor have also lost less data than those using multiple solutions, on average.”