Dubai firm highlights growing threat of ransomware

DUBAI: A Dubai-based firm highlighted the challenges that businesses around the globe are facing as they try to protect data stored in complex hybrid multi-cloud environments, from the growing threat of ransomware.

In its 2020 ransomware resiliency report, Veritas Technologies, a global leader in data protection, availability and insights, found that only 36 per cent of overall respondents said that their security has kept pace with their IT complexity.

In the UAE and KSA, only 43 per cent and 29 per cent of respondents have kept pace with their IT complexity, respectively, underscoring the need for greater use of data protection solutions that can protect against ransomware across the entirety of increasingly heterogenous environments.

Typically, if businesses fall foul to ransomware and are not able to restore their data from a backup copy of their files, they may look to pay the hackers responsible for the atack to return their information.

The Veritas research showed that companies with greater complexity in their multi-cloud infrastructure were more likely to make these payments.

The mean number of clouds deployed by those organisations who paid a ransom in full was 14.06. This dropped to 12.61 for those who paid only part of the ransom and went as low as 7.22 for businesses who didn’t pay at all. In fact, only 20 per cent of businesses with fewer than five clouds paid a ransom in full, less than half the number (44 per cent) for those with more than 20. This compares with 57 per cent of the under-fives paying nothing to their hackers and just 17 per cent of the over-20s.