Ransomware has become dangerously pervasive today, so much so that a recent survey by Tech Target’s Enterprise Strategy Group found that 32% of organizations experienced a ransomware attack.
And that wasn’t the first time: forty-one percent were hit again, and another 32% were attacked more than once, according to ESG.
Given these circumstances, companies have to focus on their ransomware preparedness, said Christophe Bertrand, a practice director who covers data management at ESG. And it’s especially true for midsized businesses because they are subject to the same type of ransomware attacks large enterprises face, explains Bertrand, in a recent webinar about overcoming ransomware.
Bertrand pointed out that only 20% of midsize companies are confident in their ransomware preparedness. He added that only 34% of midsize companies have incident response plans, while 49% of larger enterprise companies have such plans.
“Midsize companies also lag with having C-Suite support where only 28% have the C-Suite involved, which demonstrates a lack of communication, support, and potentially financial resources,” says Bertrand.
Richard Jew, a senior product manager at Hitachi Vantara, said that IT managers have to understand three main trends: ransomware will not go away any time soon; the extortion around ransomware will only increase in cost; and even if the victim organization pays the ransom, there’s no guarantee it will actually get back the data. “Eighty-six percent of companies that paid the ransom were not able to recover all their data,” notes Jew.
Enter managed service providers
These midsize companies are working closely with managed service providers (MSPs) such as Insight Enterprises to solve many of these data storage challenges.
Mike Demuse, a solution architect at Insight, said companies need to start by knowing their environment. Demuse said Insight works with midsize companies to help them conduct a data protection assessment.
During an assessment, companies need to focus on the critical sensitive data they need to keep the business running. They also need to calculate how much downtime they can absorb. In other words, ask what five minutes of downtime would cost, as well as one hour and even up to two weeks.
“We help customers identify which apps contain the information that must be protected and then we help them decide on the products they need to deploy,” Demuse said. “Anybody can store data, but can you get it back? Can you recover 1,000 virtual machines in 20 minutes? What about 2,000 or 5,000 VMs?”
On the product front, Hitachi Vantara offers its VSP E Series storage array for midsize companies and the VSP 5000 arrays for large enterprises. These products deliver agile copy data services, where the systems finds the right replication and copies for clones and snapshot; secure data storage, which delivers immutable data that cannot be deleted or changed; and ransomware mitigation tools that analyze and scan for abnormal activity and automate ransomware recovery operations.
Want to learn more about the ransomware risks facing midsize organizations? View this webinar.
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