NAIROBI, Kenya, April A new report has revealed that 76 percent of organizations globally suffered downtime and data loss in 2021, an issue which was caused by system crashes, human error and cyberattacks.
The report released by Acronis, a cyber protection firm, surveyed over 6,200 IT users and IT managers from small businesses to enterprises across 22 countries, including South Africa.
Despite the use of up to 10 solutions to protect their systems, Acronis highlighted that more than half of them suffered downtime underlying the need to advance systems.
”We see that trend getting worse: while 78 percent of organizations globally run as many as 10 different solutions, 76 percent of organizations experienced downtime due to data loss — a 25 percent increase from 2021. This downtime stemmed from a number of sources, including system crashes (52percent), human error (42percent), cyberattacks (36percent), and insider attacks (20percent),” the report noted.
The report also cited overconfidence as a trend that is responsible for cyberdefenses lowering and increasing IT security budgets.
It cited South Africa where only 20 percent of organizations in South Africa claim to spend over 25percent of their IT budget on security.
“Eighty-two percent also claim to have ransomware protection and remediation. Yet, successful attacks occur weekly and the size of ransom demands grows each year.” The report indicated
“It seems that IT managers are trying to appear better prepared than they are; but that is, in turn, misleading their managers, boards of directors, industry analysts and customers,” the report noted.
Eighty-three percent of IT users in South Africa said that they were either very or moderately concerned with increased politically-motivated cyberattacks
Another 43 percent said they were unsure if their anti-malware solutions could protect against new and emerging cyberthreats.
Candid Wuest, Acronis V.P. of Cyber Protection Research has urged companies to adopt an all-in-one solution in order to achieve truly complete cyber protection
“Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so strong and reliable security is no longer an option, it’s a necessity.” he remarked.
