According to a survey conducted among Australian businesses, those using multi-cloud are at greater risk of being exposed to a ransomware attack and are more likely to pay the ransom demanded by hackers to regain control of their data
Veritas , revealed in its report, that only 43% of Australian respondents said their security is keeping up with the increasing complexity of their IT environment.
According to the report, approximately 57% of Australian organizations use multi-cloud environments. 33% of organizations with more than 20 services were found to be willing to pay the ransom in the event of a ransomware attack, compared to 19% of businesses with fewer than five cloud services who would do the same.
The survey, conducted in September and involving responses from 150 senior Australian IT executives from companies with 1,000 employees or more, also found that a business using multi-cloud was likely to struggle to recover from a ransomware.
While 41% of those businesses with fewer than five cloud providers in their infrastructure saw their operations disrupted for less than a day, 67% with over 20 providers took five to 10 days to return to normal operations .
“Our research shows that Essential Eight compliance is critical. Fortunately, some businesses are investing to close this gap, but unless this happens more quickly, companies will remain vulnerable.”
In terms of security investments ,more than half of Australian businesses said they had increased their security budget due to the COVID-19, with Veritas noting that those who increased their security investment were able to restore their data faster.
However, the results show that more needs to be done, with the average business only able to recover 82% of its data, Veritas said. While Australian organisations are still at risk of ransomware attacks when compared on a global basis, they are in a better position. Australian organisations were hit by 1.14 ransomware attacks, which is below the global average of 1.87.
Source: ZDNet
