Still Not Spending Enough on Cybersecurity

A new Acronis global report shows half of organizations are still allocating less than 10% of their IT budgets to cybersecurity.

The report surveyed over 6,200 IT users and IT managers from small businesses to enterprises across 22 countries. It exposes some of the most critical shortcomings appearing in cyber protection practices today.

Major findings include:

• While 78% of organizations globally run as many as 10 different solutions for data protection and cybersecurity, 76% experienced downtime due to data loss, a 25% increase from 2021.
• Only 10% of users back up daily, 15% back up once or twice a week and 34% back up on a monthly basis. Forty-one percent rarely or never back up their data.
• Over half of all personal IT users lost data at least once in 2021, while 26% lost it multiple times.
• Even highly publicized, and effective, cyberattack vectors like crypto jacking and DoS/DDoS are discounted by a significant percentage of personal IT users — 43% aren’t concerned or aware of crypto jacking, and 36% aren’t concerned or aware of DoS/ DDoS attacks.

Organizations in the United States and Canada are less certain if their data has been tampered with, at 75% and 71% respectively. They fall slightly behind the global average.

Roughly one-third of organizations in Brazil, Canada and the United States have experienced downtime due to a cyberattack in the past year.

Candid Wuest is Acronis‘ vice president of cyber protection research.

“As the entire world is increasingly at risk from different types of attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one solutions is the only way to achieve truly complete cyber protection,” he said. “Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so strong and reliable security is no longer an option. It’s a necessity.”