Despite the frequent ransomware attacks today, organisations are not doing enough to protect themselves. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of organisations globally had partial or complete ransomware attacks on their backup repositories in the past year, according to the 2022 Ransomware Trends Report by Veeam, a backup, recovery and data management solutions provider.
Although 76% of them paid the ransom to end the ransomware attack, 24% were still unable to recover their data. This shows that there is a one-in-three chance that paying the ransom will not achieve anything, highlighting the need for organisations to strengthen their data protection strategy.
Common data protection mistakes
In an interview with DigitalEdge Singapore, Shiva Pillay, Veeam’s general manager and senior vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan, shares that organisations in Asia Pacific (APAC) are now taking data security more seriously as data loss could negatively impact the business in various ways.
“If you see any of the companies that have suffered significant ransomware attacks, their business performance goes down as those attacks not only affect their revenue but also their share price. [This is why], many APAC organisations are increasing their cybersecurity spend to protect their data,” he says.
However, there are three common mistakes APAC businesses tend to make when it comes to data protection.
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[The first mistake] is not having a data protection strategy to begin with, or not having a compelling one. If you think about disaster recovery or business continuity, it’s [usually] a piece of paper with a plan, and that plan isn’t tested or put in place effectively.
Shiva Pillay, general manager and senior vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan, Veeam
The way Pillay sees it, a lack of understanding of where all the data is, where it resides and who can access it, is another mistake APAC organisations tend to make. Finally, companies that are thinking of modernising their on-premises IT environment with cloud and containers usually “don’t have an effective strategy to bridge the gap between legacy and cloud technologies”, he adds.
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Data in the cloud isn’t protected by default
As organisations increasingly store their data or use services on the public cloud, they should note that they are still responsible for securing their data.
“There’s still a perception out there — especially among the CEOs and CIOs — that data is protected by default once it’s in the public cloud. [The reality is that] the public cloud isn’t going to back up and secure your data automatically so organisations need to think about their data protection strategy when they move to the cloud,” explains Anthony Spiteri, Veeam’s senior global technologist.
To add to the data protection challenge, many organisations today are embracing hybrid cloud, which means their data is sitting in various environments — be it on-premises or in the public or private cloud. This calls for tools that are flexible enough to secure data regardless of where the data resides. Understanding that, Veeam provides a single platform that enables organisations to own, control, and protect all their data across environments.
“Customers today are consuming technology on a year- by-year basis, and can easily change where they put their data. [So we’re giving them the] flexibility and reliability to back up their data across environments and recover it when [and where] they need it the most,” says Pillay.
Granules India is one company that is using Veeam to better secure its mission-critical data across various environments. The pharmaceutical manufacturer leverages Veeam Backup & Replication to protect 40 mission-critical virtual and physical servers with a total data volume of 12TB.
“In the past, backing up our production systems took four hours of manual work a day, and we only maintained a single copy of that data on site at our data centre,” says Srinivasa Reddy, global head of IT at Granules India.
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He adds: “Thanks to Veeam, we can back up our vital business systems in just 10 minutes to three different on-premises and cloud locations, ensuring redundancy. Crucially, we’ve cut the time it takes to restore data from three hours to 30 minutes — an 83% improvement that helps us deliver smooth business continuity in the event of a recovery scenario.”
Putting customers’ needs first
During its VeeamON 2022 conference in May, the company revealed that it was now in joint first place in the data protection market with Dell.
“To [come in first], we need to solve [our] customers’ problems. And to do that, we need to build channel, partner and alliances ecosystems that are all geared towards the same sort of end-goal, [which is] data protection for our customers,” says Pillay.
“In terms of [driving] awareness, I think we’re working really well with a lot of alliances and vendors to [drive the importance of data protection]. For example, we’re working with Lenovo to bridge their storage story and our ransomware story. We’re also working with Amazon Web Services for our multi-cloud narrative,” he adds.
Those efforts have paid off — Veeam closed its FY2021 with a record 27% y-o-y growth in its annual recurring revenue. Commenting on the results, Veeam’s newly-minted chief revenue officer John Jester says the company will focus on listening to its customers to further propel business growth.
“[Our customers] have certain apps and workloads that they’ve moved to the cloud [but some workloads will continue] to be on-premises for a long time. Veeam’s ability to let them manage that data anywhere — whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises — by having a common view and set of policies presents a big opportunity for us. [I believe this differentiating factor] will give us the ability to double our current market share in the data protection space,” he shares.
He adds: “At the end of the day, data is the most important asset for a company. So I think providing more insights to our customers on their data will open up a wider market opportunity for us, [putting us in a good position to achieve our revenue goal of US$10 billion ($13.86 billion)].”
