Arcserve Survey Reveals Vulnerabilities in Ransomware and Data Recovery Preparedness of Local Government and Public Services

Arcserve, the world's most experienced provider of backup, recovery, and immutable storage solutions for unified data resilience against ransomware and disasters, today released a segment from its annual independent global research. The segment focuses on government IT departments' approach and experience with ransomware and data recovery preparedness. The findings reveal several weaknesses that can hamper government departments' fight against ransomware and their ability to recover data.

Key findings include:

• 36% of government IT departments do not have a documented disaster recovery plan.
• Only 38% of government IT departments have a comprehensive business continuity plan. that includes recovery, interim solutions, and communication.
• 24% of remote government workers are not equipped with backup and recovery solutions.
• 45% of government IT departments mistakenly believe it is not their responsibility to recover data and applications in public clouds.
• 33% of government organizations require over a day to recover from severe data loss, despite 82% reporting that less than one day is an acceptable level of downtime for critical systems.
• Only 34% are very confident in their IT team's ability to recover all lost data in the event of a ransomware attack.

Said Patrick Tournoy, executive vice president of operations at Arcserve, "It's like opening yourself up to a one-two knock-out punch. Gaps in protecting remote workers and cloud-based apps and data create an ideal hunting ground for bad actors and ransomware, while not having documented and tested recovery plans leave an organization more vulnerable and poorly equipped to recover data."

Arcserve urges government IT departments to prioritize data protection and rapid recovery by following three key steps: develop and regularly test a disaster recovery plan, implement the advanced 3-2-1-1 backup strategy to guard against ransomware, and utilize immutable storage to prevent data alteration.

About the research conducted by Dimensional Research: 1,121 IT decision-makers completed the survey. All participants had a budget or technical decision-making responsibility for data management, data protection, and storage solutions at a company with 100 - 2,500 employees and at least 5 TB of data. The survey was fielded in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada (North America).

About Arcserve

Arcserve, a top 5 data protection vendor and unified data resilience platform provider, offers the broadest set of best-in-class solutions to manage, protect, and recover all data workloads, from SMB to enterprise, regardless of location or complexity. Arcserve solutions eliminate complexity while bringing best-in-class, cost-effective, agile, and massively scalable data protection and certainty across all data environments. This includes on-prem, off-prem (including DRaaS, BaaS, and Cloud-to-Cloud), hyper-converged, and edge infrastructures. The company's nearly three decades of award-winning IP, plus a continuous focus on innovation, means that partners and customers, including MSPs, VARs, LARs, and end-users, are assured of the fastest route to next-generation data workloads and infrastructures. A 100% channel-centric organization, Arcserve has a presence in over 150 countries, with 19,000 channel partners helping to protect 235,000 customers' critical data assets. Explore more at arcserve.com and follow @Arcserve on Twitter.