Attacks and data breaches across the globe continue to increase as highly personal data has become a target for cybercriminals. While organizations try to fight back, cybercriminals continue to find new ways to access and exploit readable personal data, especially when stored in the cloud.
Data breaches in the US are at an all-time high. In just the first nine months of 2023, US data breaches increased by nearly 20% compared to all of 2022 — and organizations around the world face similar trends.
Because personal data can be exploited and sold for a significant profit, it has become a growing and attractive target for cybercriminals. Cyber attacks are increasingly harmful, as conducting personal and business activity online has become standard practice. Corporations, governments, and other types of organizations collect growing amounts of personal data, and sometimes, individuals have little, if any, choice in the matter.
While we know that ransomware attacks can severely jeopardize an organization’s infrastructure, reputation, and financial status, new research reveals the potential negative effects on businesses and staff, society, the economy, and national security — pointing to a negative impact on mental and physical health as well. Series health issues such as heart attacks, strokes, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to name a few, may be associated with those directly involved in the response to a ransomware attack.
Stress increases with the rise of financial concerns, extremely long workdays, communications with the threat actor, and simply feeling a direct responsibility for protecting the organization’s systems.
3 Key Trends Dictating Strategies
Considering the profound consequences of cyber and ransomware attacks, organizations are looking for more innovative solutions to thwart such attacks when they occur. Three key trends are unfolding that provide a greater line of defense:
- IT leaders are shifting their focus from backup to recovery. Organizations need complete and immediate data recovery with no downtime or, at most, only milliseconds of downtime to prevent criminals from holding a business and its data hostage for days, weeks, or more. Traditionally, different backup sets are restored, one after another, and inspected until missing or damaged files are found. That process can take hours, days, or longer to recover data – a process that is inefficient and costly. Novel approaches are emerging that enable continuous data availability as a strong first line of defense against cyber threats, enabling organizations to recover compromised data easily and instantly. Continuous data availability is a game-changing form of protection that actively records every significant change in real-time for every file so a user can go back to any point in time to retrieve data - easily and without the assistance of IT. Organizations will increasingly leverage continuous data availability technology to protect data from loss and cyber threats.
- Multifactor authentication goes a step further with authorization to thwart insider threats. Multifactor authentication alone is not sufficient to protect data from insider threats. Organizations will adopt innovative technology that adds authorization as a second layer to the authentication process to better protect their data. Multifactor authentication and authorization (MFA&A) confirm individual identity during authentication and then grants authorization or approval as appropriate when attempting to perform sensitive data operations to prevent unauthorized access, modification, and deletion. Together, multifactor authentication and authorization provide much more robust security, increase control over system access, and reduce the risk of data breaches. MFA&A also provides enhanced accountability through audit trials, helping to ensure compliance with industry regulations. Organizations that implement MFA&A in 2024 will achieve greater confidence that their sensitive data is protected while ensuring the integrity of their file systems.
- Organizations demand greater data resiliency against cyber threats. As data environments reach hundreds of petabytes and hundreds of billions of files, protecting data will become an increasingly difficult and complex challenge. Organizations need their data to be resilient and continuously available, with the ability to spring back seamlessly to reduce the risk of critical data loss and the impact of downtime, outages, data breaches, and natural disasters. Resiliency prevents downtime when performing upgrades, data migration, and planned maintenance. Achieving data resilience at scale requires a radical new model to address the magnitude of modern data demands, one that maximizes data resilience and revolutionizes today’s broken backup paradigm. Traditional backup is independent of the file system, but a new approach merges the file system and backup as one entity. As a result, every change in the file system is recorded as it happens, making it seamless to retrieve lost or deleted data, regardless of when it existed and across the entire time continuum. This approach redefines enterprise storage by converging storage and data protection in one system.
Despite the continued growth of cyber security and ransomware attacks, new, innovative technologies are rising to the occasion, delivering data resilience, immediate recovery mechanisms, and stronger access requirements for higher levels of data protection.
