Zero Trust Efforts Stall as Cyberattacks Rocket to $1M per Incident

Organizations are struggling with mounting data losses, increased downtime, and rising recovery costs due to cyberattacks — to the tune of $1.06 million in costs per incident. Meanwhile, IT security staffs are stalled on getting defenses up to speed.

That's according to the 2022 Dell Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers across 15 countries and 14 industries, which found that organizations that experienced disruption have also suffered an average of 2TB data loss and 19 hours of downtime. 

Most respondents (67%) said they lack confidence that their existing data protection measures are sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats. A full 63% said they are not very confident that all business-critical data can be reliably recovered in the event of a destructive cyberattack.

Their fears seem founded: Nearly half of respondents (48%) experienced a cyberattack in the past 12 months that prevented access to their data (a 23% increase from 2021) — and that's a trend that Colm Keegan, senior consultant for data protection solutions at Dell Technologies, says will likely continue. 

"The growth and increased distribution of data across edge, core data center and multiple public cloud environments are making it exceedingly difficult for IT admins to protect their data," Keegan explains.

Related:Why the Zero Trust Model Will Become the New Security Norm

On the protection front, most organizations are falling behind; for instance, 91% are aware of or planning to deploy a zero-trust architecture, but only 12% are fully deployed.

And it's not just advanced defense that's lacking: Keegan points out that 69% of respondents stated they simply cannot meet their backup windows to be prepared for a ransomware attack.

Data Protection Strategies Face Headwinds

One of the primary reasons data protection strategies are failing is the lack of visibility of where that data resides and what it is — a problem exacerbated by the rapid, ongoing adoption of cloud-native apps and containers. More than three-quarters of survey respondents said there is a lack of common data protection solutions for these newer technologies.

"Seventy-two percent said they are unable to keep up with what their developers are doing in the cloud — it’s basically a blind spot for them," Keegan says.

Claude Mandy, chief evangelist of data security at Symmetry Systems, a provider of hybrid cloud data security solutions, agrees that a lack of visibility is the primary reason current data-protection strategies fail.

Read the complete article on our sister site Dark Reading.