New Threats to Confidential Data: Acronis Global Survey Results

Hello, Habr! We want to share with you the statistics that we managed to collect during our fifth global survey. About why data loss occurred more often, what threats are most afraid of users, how often backups are made today and to which media, and most importantly, why there will only be more data loss - read under the cat.



Previously, we traditionally celebrated Worldwide Backup Day on March 31 every year. But in recent years, the issue of data protection has become so acute, and in our new quarantine reality, traditional approaches and solutions to ensure data protection can no longer meet the needs of both private users and organizations. Therefore, World Backup Day has transformed into an entire World Cyber ​​Defense Week , in the framework of which we publish the results of our study.

For five years, we have asked individual users who are well versed in information technology, questions about their experience in backing up and restoring data, data loss, etc. This year, the study involved about 3,000 people from 11 countries. In addition to individual users, we tried to increase the number of respondents among IT specialists. And so that the survey results were more revealing, we compared the data of 2020 with the results of 2019.

Individual users

In the world of personal users, the data protection situation has long ceased to be rosy. Although 91% of individuals back up their data and devices, 68% still lose data as a result of accidental deletion, malfunctioning of hardware or software, or too rare backups. The number of people reporting loss of data or devices jumped sharply in 2019 , and in 2020 they became another 3% more.



Over the past year, individual users began to make backups to the cloud more often. The number of people storing backups in the clouds increased by 5%, and those who prefer hybrid storage (both locally and in the cloud) increased by 7%. Fans of remote backup were joined by users who had previously made a copy to the built-in and external hard drive.

With online and hybrid backup systems becoming more intuitive and convenient, more important data is now stored in the clouds. At the same time, the percentage of people who do not make backups at all increased by 2%. This is an interesting trend. She most likely says that users simply give up in the face of new threats, believing that they still can’t cope with them.



However, we decided to ask people ourselves why they do not want to make backups, and in 2020 the main reason it became the opinion that "it is simply not necessary." Thus, many people still underestimate the risks of data loss and the benefits of backups.



On the other hand, over the year, the number of people who believe that backups take too long has grown slightly (we understand them - such developments as Active Restore are underway ), as well as those who are sure that setting up protection is too complicated. At the same time, people who consider backup software and services too expensive are less than 5%.



Perhaps in the near future the number of people who consider backups to be optional may become less, because individual users' awareness of modern cyber threats has grown. Concerns about ransomware attacks last year increased by 29%. Concerns that crypto-jacking can be used against the user have grown by 31%, while attacks using social engineering (for example, phishing) are now afraid of 34% more.

IT professionals and business

Since last year, our research and surveys dedicated to World Backup Day and World Cyber ​​Defense Week have been attended by information technology experts from around the world. So in 2020, for the first time, we have the opportunity to compare answers and track trends in the professional environment.



The backup frequency in most cases has increased. There were specialists making backups more than 2 times a day, and much fewer specialists began to backup 1-2 times a month. It came to be understood that such rare copies are not very useful, but it also led to an increase in the number of those who do not make any copies at all. Indeed, why, if we cannot do them more often, and there is practically no sense in a monthly copy for a business? However, this opinion is definitely erroneous, since modern products allow you to set up flexible backups throughout the company, and we have already talked about this in our blog several times.



Those who do backups, for the most part, have retained the existing approach to storing replicas. Nevertheless, in 2020, specialists appeared who preferred a remote data center to copy to the cloud.

More than a third of respondents (36%) store backups in “cloud storage (Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Acronis Cloud, etc.).” A quarter of all interviewed professionals store backups “on a local storage device (tape drives, storage arrays, specialized backup devices, etc.)”, and 20% use a hybrid of local and cloud storage.

This is interesting data, because the hybrid backup method, which is more effective than many other approaches and also cheaper than replication, is not used by four out of five IT specialists.



Given such decisions regarding the frequency and locations of backups, it is not surprising that the proportion of IT professionals who have experienced data loss resulting in downtime has grown quite significantly. This year, 43% of organizations lost their data at least once, which is 12% more than in 2019.

In 2020, almost half of the professionals faced data loss and downtime. But just one hour of downtime can cost an organization $ 300,000 .

Further more: 9% of specialists said that they did not even know whether their company suffered from data loss and whether business downtime dictated it. That is, approximately one out of ten professionals cannot speak with confidence about the built-in protection and at least some level of guaranteed accessibility of their information environment.



But this is the most interesting part of the study. Compared to 2019, information technology specialists have become less worried about all relevant cyber threats. Techies have become more confident in their ability to avoid cyber threats or deal with them. But combining downtime statistics with these data indicates problems in the industry, because cyberthreats are only becoming more complex and sophisticated, and the excessive relaxation of specialists plays into the hands of attackers. The only problem of social engineering in attacks on people with a certain access deserves special attention.

Conclusion

At the end of 2019, even more individual users and business representatives faced data loss. At the same time, the complexity of implementing real-time data protection and regular backups plays an important role in creating security holes that cybercriminals use.

To simplify the implementation of security systems, we are currently working on Acronis Cyber ​​Protect Cloud, which will help simplify the implementation of hybrid data protection. By the way, you can join beta testing now . And in the next posts we will talk more about new Acronis technologies and solutions.