Top Cyber Protection Week Survey Takeaways for IT Pros

As the first-ever World Cyber Protection Week begins to wind down, we’re taking an in-depth look at what the results of this year’s survey mean for IT professionals around the world. Whether you’re an IT army of one or part of an enterprise’s team of techxperts, the survey results we shared earlier this week offer a wealth of insights into how your industry is responding to modern protection challenges.

With this IT pro-focused review, you’ll learn where your peers are excelling, where they aren’t, and how you both stack up to (and can get ahead of) the pack. If you learn something that your network needs to hear, feel free to share. Just tag your response with #CyberFit or #CyberProtectionWeek to add your voice to the conversation.

Explore our 2020 World Cyber Protection Week results further:

General survey result analysis

Personal user result analysis

Service provider result analysis

This year’s IT pro survey showed a positive trend in backup frequency. After last year’s survey showed the largest segment of organizations (35%) backing up on a monthly basis, the shift this year to weekly backups (28%) and daily backups (27%) shows a definite increase in data protection efforts.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t matched by an increased adherence to the industry best practices: hybrid backups and the 3-2-1 rule. Just one-fifth of our respondents (20%) reported that they back up to the recommended combination of local and remote (or cloud) storage destinations. The largest segment of responses (36%) rely exclusively on cloud services like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Acronis Cloud. Another 25% exclusively back up to local storage destinations, while the remaining 20% only replicate their backup data to another data center.

Together, these results represent a generally positive trend: businesses are working harder to keep their data, applications, and systems safe through backups. But they aren’t doing all they can to ensure data safety – and it shows. Our survey found that 43% of organizations experienced downtime this year following a data loss event. Another 41% reported lost revenue and productivity due to data inaccessibility.

An organization that follows these industry best practices is better able to avoid these incidents.

As you might expect given the wave of data breaches, phishing attacks, and ransomware outbreaks that have filled the headlines in recent years, IT professionals are highly aware and concerned about modern cyberthreats. This year’s survey found 88% of organizations concerned about ransomware, 86% concerned about cryptojacking, 87% concerned about social engineering attacks like phishing, and 91% concerned about data breaches.

While concerns runs high, our survey suggests that a majority of IT professionals feel as though they have solutions in place that could help mitigate the threat of these cybercrimes. A full 71%  of respondents said their anti-malware could be trusted to detect zero-day cyberthreats while 69% claimed they had solutions in place to determine if data in their IT environments had been modified or accessed by unexpected or unauthorized sources.

Both of these findings indicate widespread awareness of the dangers modern cyberthreats pose. The small percentages of IT professionals who didn’t share these concerns or possess methods to evade and overcome them should seek to understand what their peers already have and start taking immediate steps to equip their IT environments with the cyber protection solutions needed to withstand sophisticated, modern cyberthreats.

For organizations that maintain a healthy level of concern about these subjects and feel they have solid defenses in place, consider gaps that might lie between the disparate solutions protecting your environment. Today, when so much of the global workforce is suddenly working from home, vulnerabilities tend to arise and threaten even the most confident of businesses.

Despite the majority of IT professionals taking steps to prepare for these modern cyberthreats, there’s a small but noteworthy segment of businesses that don’t understand the severity of the threats against them – and they don’t know if they’re equipped to overcome them.

In addition to 10% of organizations never backing up their data, applications, and systems, there were other staggering findings:

• 6% aren’t sure if they’re subject to any data privacy regulations
• 12% wouldn’t know if their data was unexpectedly accessed or modified
• 13% aren’t sure their anti-malware can stop zero-day threats
• 9% aren’t even sure if they had data loss that resulted in downtime this year

In 2020, when protecting business data is more critical and more complicated than ever before, this lack of knowledge is shocking – regardless of the size of its presence. IT professionals who don’t have a clear understanding of how their solutions might overcome modern threats need to thoroughly assess their environment to determine what security gaps exist and which, if any, have already been exploited.

Acronis makes it easy for IT professionals like you to attain reliable peace of mind, knowing that their entire IT environment is protected by a unified solution that combines the best of data protection with the most innovative cybersecurity solutions.

Only Acronis Cyber Protection Solutions balance the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection, ensuring that your business’ data is at once safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure. With this new modern approach, available through Acronis Cyber Backup – the world’s most reliable and easy-to-use backup solution for businesses of all sizes – your organization gains complete protection, full availability, and proactive AI-based defenses against the newest, most sophisticated ransomware and cryptojacking threats.