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Given a chain is as strong as its weakest link, data protection strategies for payment firms could come undone due to increasing weaknesses in data storage, a new report finds.
A report by software company Veeam has found most IT organisations failing to sufficiently back up their stored data.
In a survey of the 3,000 IT specialists, 89 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed to the statement “My organization has a gap between how frequently our data is backed up versus how much data that we can afford to lose after an outage”.
This represents a 13 percent jump compared with a survey carried out the previous year. At the heart of this rise is likely to be the challenge of increasing volumes of data as part of the growing digital shift, while also dealing with complex data protection requirements.
The report also finds lack of IT staff (54 percent), legacy systems (53 percent) and time taken up by the pandemic (51 percent) are the three biggest challenges to digital transformation in IT storage systems.
This is despite data protection budgets expected to increase by 5.9 percent in 2022.
The report concludes this is most likely because of “the rising criticality of more workloads”, with on-premises stagnation during the COVID-19 pandemic and later supply chain issues as blockchain miners caused a shortage of computer parts .Therefore, it has become more difficult for data storage providers to keep up with rising challenges.
The threat from cyber attacks
For the second year in a row, cyber attacks were the single largest cause of downtime, with 76 percent of organisations reporting at least one ransomware event in the past 12 months.
The report states “[b]reakages are more common, but cyber attacks are most impactful”, with a third of data typically unrecoverable after a cyber attack.
The solution seems to be innovation, with 67 percent of businesses turning to cloud-based solutions to protect their data, while the ability to recover data from ransomware attacks continues to drive business continuity strategies.
“As cyber attacks become increasingly sophisticated and even more difficult to prevent, backup and recovery solutions are essential foundations of any organisation’s Modern Data Protection strategy,” said Danny Allan, chief technology officer at Veeam.
