In mid-2021, Gartner forecast that more than half of global knowledge workers would be remote by the end of the year. While those year-end numbers aren’t in yet, if you’re in IT, you’re already dealing with this growing trend, not necessarily in a good way. A global industry study found that 74% of organizations attribute recent cyberattacks that affected their business to vulnerabilities resulting from pandemic-driven changes like the massive spike we’ve seen in remote and mobile workforces.
In our modern world, it’s not so much if a cyberattack strikes your business, but when. For example, ransomware attacks (just one of the many forms of cybercrime) occur every 11 seconds (CISA 2021). When considering that stunning statistic in the context of the myriad ways that cyber criminals can target your organization, it becomes virtually impossible to wrap your mind around how common cybersecurity issues really are.
As you may know, many organizations last year learned the hard way that cyberdefense needs to be a core part of their mission. In March, the cybercrime gang known as Hafnium made global news when it attacked tens of thousands of organizations around the world through vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange software. That gave the cybercriminals access to confidential information including usernames and passwords, intellectual property, and material that could be used for blackmail. It took an unprecedented move by the FBI to prevent the Hafnium attack from being catastrophic.
The dispersed workplace creates new kinds of cyber threats, and many organizations face urgent cybersecurity challenges. The rise in remote and hybrid work environments brought about by the pandemic was estimated by Gartner to include 51 % of global workers at the end of this past year. And the prevalence of Work From Home (WFH) will almost certainly continue.
Security incidents can vary widely in their scope and severity of damage. However, regardless of how serious an incident may appear, it will always have financial implications.
Data backup and recovery are blind spots for many CEOs and business leaders. A recent survey of IT decision-makers reported that only 8% of their CEOs track metrics to ensure a complete recovery plan. The same study found that 58% of CEOs just wanted to know that a data recovery plan was in place, ignoring the details. With the average cost of a data breach pegged at $4.24 million, that could be an expensive mistake.
