World Cyber Protection Week Survey Reveals Most IT Pros Back up Their Data – But Still Can’t Sleep at Night

If you’re just joining us, we’re nearing the end of World Cyber Protection Week – a natural (and necessary) extension of World Backup Day, which started nearly ten years ago to help raise awareness for a benchmark data protection best practice: backing up your data.

As part of that annual celebration, Acronis conducts a survey to get insight from both personal users and IT pros about their recent experiences with data loss and protection – and evaluate their current thinking about and approach to keeping data and systems safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure (SAPAS). Naturally, the responses from the IT pros we polled globally are telling for service providers too, shedding light on what their clients are particularly concerned with – and investing in – when it comes to protection.

Here’s a quick look at what our survey revealed, including how these pros approach data protection, what’s keeping them up at night given the current threat landscape, and what can be done so they can rest easier.

Up from 86% last year, today 90% of IT pros are backing up the essential IT components that they are responsible for, including servers, endpoints, mobile devices, and beyond. While that number remains encouraging, what’s interesting is that 80% of respondents are only leveraging one backup method – either locally to an on-premises storage device (25%), to an off-site data center (20%), or to a cloud provider like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Acronis Cloud (36%).

These results indicate that there is confidence that the cloud provides a safe-haven for data. However, that approach by itself is a dangerous practice considering that the 3-2-1 rule of backup is clear: a hybrid approach, one that leverages both local and cloud storage, is the only way to truly safeguard data.  

This year’s survey showed that 35% of organizations (up from 29% in 2019) experienced downtime related to a data loss event. With a direct impact on an organization’s bottom line, this result supports additional findings that data safety (i.e. ensuring that reliable copies of data, applications, and systems are always available) is the number one concern at organizations.

Privacy (i.e. being able to control who has visibility and access to all digital assets) ranked second among the top concerns for organizations. This finding also makes sense given that more than half of respondents indicated that their organization faces strict privacy regulations.

Certainly maintaining business continuity is (and always will be) a top IT priority. Our survey tellingly revealed however, when it comes to data protection, pros aren’t just worried about historic culprits like fire and flood, human error, or even insider sabotage. These days IT is losing sleep over other known and growing threats – cyberthreats. Specifically:

• 73% of IT pros are concerned or very concerned about data breaches
• 58% of IT pros are concerned or very concerned about cryptomining
• 58% of IT pros are concerned or very concerned about social engineering
• 53% of IT pros are concerned or very concerned about ransomware

These results explain why 71% of pros are leveraging anti-malware solutions that defend against zero-day cyberthreats, and why 69% are investing in ways to identify when data is unexpectedly accessed or modified.

But there’s still significant room for improvement across the board: inadequate data protection reporting can make it hard to evaluate how #CyberFit your organization is, amplifying stress among IT pros. A remarkable 12% of survey respondents said they don’t know if their organization has a way to identify whether any data has been unexpectedly accessed or modified. Another 9% said they aren’t even sure if their organization experienced data loss that resulted in downtime this year.

Indeed, while backup remains a tried and true approach to data loss prevention, the fact of the matter is that organizations worldwide require more – backup is no longer enough in itself – and IT needs insights that will help them address weaknesses.

There’s no doubt that organizations worldwide are modernizing and mobilizing the best they can: budgets are being allocated beyond traditional backup software. Yet in-house IT pros and their service provider counterparts know that cobbling together a variety of data protection solutions is both costly and prone to gaps.

What’s needed is a single solution that balances the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection, ensuring that data is at once safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure. In addition, this solution needs to be user-friendly and integrated, ensuring streamlined management and clear reporting.

Only Acronis Cyber Protection solutions deliver on both accounts, bringing traditional backup into the modern era with built-in AI-based technology that can defend against both ransomware and cryptomining, or Acronis Active Protection. With a user-friendly UI, all-in-one management tools and insights are readily available too.

Whether you‘re managing IT for an organization or delivering managed services to clients, Acronis offers an easy way to access cyber protection solutions that meet your needs (and help you sleep at night).

For IT pros like those that responded to this year’s survey, check out Acronis Cyber Backup as a Service. This solution is already deployed in Acronis’ own (vendor-managed) cloud, making it easy for you to manage your own hybrid cloud backup solution – one that has built-in Acronis Active Protection technology.

For service providers looking for an easy, efficient, and secure way to address their clients’ modern data protection concerns (and differentiate their services as a result), Acronis Cyber Cloud provides a comprehensive approach to cyber protection. The platform features a service provider-first design with easy access to an integrated suite of services – from backup and disaster recovery (DR) to anti-malware, e-signatures, and beyond.

For example, service providers can now uplevel protection and reduce costs with the groundbreaking, new Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud service (in beta at the time of this post) – a solution that uniquely integrates data protection with cybersecurity. Available via the Acronis Cyber Cloud platform, this innovative solution gives MSPs the most effective way to deliver backup and recovery, security management, and anti-malware solutions to clients today. We invite you to learn more here.

Didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s survey? Tell us what your IT role is, how you’re handling data protection today, and what’s keeping you up at night with #CyberFit and #CyberProtectionWeek.