Arcserve Supports White House Cybersecurity Initiative

In response to the recent Biden Administration Executive Order to improve the nation’s cybersecurity and subsequent White House memo by Anne Neuberger, deputy national security advisor, Arcserve LLC, experienced data, and ransomware protection provider, shared findings of its independent research into experiences and attitudes of IT decision-makers around data protection.

The research exposes weaknesses in many organizations’ ransomware strategies that could hamper their ability to recover from an attack. These weaknesses comprise a lack of leadership engagement in data recovery strategies, weak enterprise-wide data protection measures, incomplete data recovery plans, and an absence of data recovery testing.

Research findings highlight need for:

• Greater involvement of business leaders in assessing data recovery capability. Only 8% of respondents said their CEO track metrics to ensure a robust data recovery plan. In comparison, 58% of CEOs only seek basic assurances that a data recovery plan is in place but do not request details.

• Enhanced data recovery technologies. Over a third of respondents reported a data outage in the past 12 months, and over half were unable to recover all their data.

• Holistic data recovery plans. 27% of respondents reported that ROBO are not included in data recovery plans.

• Battle test data recovery. Nearly a quarter (23%) of respondents do not test data recovery plans.

Tom Signorello, CEO, said: “We wholeheartedly applaud the White House initiative to improve the nation’s cybersecurity, and in encouraging private enterprise to take more proactive steps to protect themselves from cyber-attacks better. While awareness of the devastation caused by ransomware has grown due to recent attacks on critical infrastructure and the nation’s energy and food supply, many organization’s cybersecurity postures are not as robust as they should be. Protection of data from ransomware needs to be a top agenda item for executives across America. Organizations of all sizes urgently need to develop, evaluate and implement robust data protection plans.“

The company advises organizations to step up their ransomware preparedness by assessing and testing their prevention and remediation processes. These steps are in direct alignment with the White House advice that business executives review their corporate security posture and BC plans to ensure the ability to continue or quickly restore operations.

Prevention – ensure critical systems and data are backed up using immutable backup technology. Continuous, immutable snapshots of data cannot be overwritten or deleted by ransomware attackers. In the event of a ransomware attack, immutable snapshots keep data protected and are completely immune to any modification or deletion.

Remediation – while immutable snapshots ensure an organization can recover from an attack, the recovery speed is critical. Organizations need to evaluate and ensure they have a well-defined, rapid, and orchestrated recovery plan in place. This includes data throughout the infrastructure, not only in the data center. The ability to restore data from the known recovery point that was not impacted allows an organization to return to normal operations in minutes without paying a ransom or losing data.

When implemented correctly and tested regularly, these straightforward steps can reliably protect data and thwart ransomware attacks for companies of all sizes and at a wide range of price points.

The company provides data management, protection, and recovery offerings for on-prem, off-prem, hyper-converged, cloud and edge data infrastructures. By leveraging its technologies – such as data protection, Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS), continuous data availability and immutable storage snapshots, – organizations, regardless of their data size, complexity or location, have access toadvanced, proactive, and multi-layered strategies to neutralize ransomware attacks, mitigate risk in the event of a cyberattack, and eliminate downtime relating to data recovery.

About the research:
Dimensional Research conducted research with a total of 709 qualified respondents. All respondents had budget or technical decision-making responsibility for data management, data protection, and storage solutions at a company with 100-2,500 employees. The survey was fielded in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, UK, and the United States.