Experiences of cyberattacks or incidents have become more prevalent in the past year, contributing to increased organisational disruption. That is the finding of Dell Technologies’ latest Global Data Protection Index for 2022, based on a survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers across four regions. This includes high concerns from organisations that they will experience a disruptive event in the next 12 months (69%). A similar number are concerned that their existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats.
In Dell Technologies’ latest Innovation Index, organisations have further stated that they need to address prevalent technology barriers to innovation. This includes cybersecurity threats, with leaders understanding that organisations can innovate with confidence when their data and applications are secure and protected.
Identifying cyber threats
Of the UK organisations who identified an attack, the most common threat was phishing attempts (83%) and one in five (21%) identified a more sophisticated attack type such as a denial of service, malware, or ransomware attack. The 2022 Cyberthreat Defense Report claims that 73% of UK organisations dealt with a ransomware attack last year, a 15% rise on 2021.
Another type of threat becoming increasingly common, according to the NCSC, is supply chain attacks. These attacks involve hackers targeting an organisation’s suppliers to gain access to sensitive information or systems. Supply chain attacks increased by 80% compared to the previous year.
As cloud offerings have evolved to provide more options and greater flexibility, the complexity of managing them has increased as well, making cloud-based applications vulnerable to exploitation.
But while technical vulnerabilities may cause data breaches, human error remains the most likely cause of damage – according to CybSafe it accounts for 9 out of 10 cyber breaches.
Further to the threat of cyber breaches themselves is the challenge of recovery. On average, advanced cyberattacks go 197 days undetected.
These challenges combined make it harder for organisations to focus on innovations instead of responding to cyber threats. Dell Technologies’ latest Innovation Index found that over 48% of organisations in the UK are busy securing their data and do not have time to work on new innovative solutions for the business.
Building cyber resilience
To successfully improve their cybersecurity posture and unlock innovation, organisations must take a proactive approach to cybersecurity and implement strategies that address the evolving threat landscape.
This includes adopting a “Secure by Default” approach – a strategy that involves designing systems, applications, and devices with built-in security features enabled by default, reducing the need for users to make complex security configurations and settings and thus minimising human error.
Another helpful strategy to consider is “Zero Trust”, based on the principle of “never trust, always verify”. It assumes that no user, application or device should be automatically trusted, even if they are inside the organisation’s network. It is not a product or tool but a strategy that delivers innovative security controls to prevent, detect, and respond to threats.
But the complexity of the threat landscape means that many find building a unified cybersecurity strategy challenging. Instead, organisations risk ending up with multiple security controls that do not work together.
Developing your cyber strategy and utilising the cloud
From Dell Technologies’ perspective, a unified cyber strategy should involve understanding the threat and the methods they use, being able to detect activity as early as possible, disrupt the attack and recover quickly.
Dell Technologies offers a comprehensive ecosystem of cyber solutions to activate this strategy. We help our customers to create lasting resilience by building security into their modern infrastructure and developing operational efficiency. We also develop a security programme that allows transparency across customers’ entire data estate, giving them visibility over all potential attack surfaces. And finally, our solutions eliminate security control silos to enable a context-centric unified approach to data protection.
The key to this is multicloud. To enable hybrid, multicloud operations, organisations have raised that the most important capabilities are the ability to protect multiple workloads and ensure cybersecurity across all environments.
Dell’s Innovation Index found that Innovation Leaders and Adopters (18% of organisations surveyed) are 1.8 times more likely to adopt an as-a-Service model and embrace multicloud compared to other businesses, who are lagging in their adoption of innovation.
Those innovators are more than twice as likely to be confident that in the next 1-2 years, their data will be secured and protected at the Edge. They are also far more likely to build a Zero Trust architecture, so they are prepared for most threats and can continue operating even after experiencing a cyberattack.
Our customers want to leverage cloud services, build more agile private cloud environments, and utilise opportunities at the Edge. So, they should be free to deploy fully protected workloads anywhere they wish through a ‘multicloud by design’ approach that allows them to get the best out of all platforms and offers a consistent exit strategy from each.
Moreover, Dell Technologies is well-equipped to prepare a path to recovery after an attack. This does not mean preparing a backup, isolated offline, but restoring a minimum viable enterprise, including all the critical assets required to get back to business as quickly as possible.
Making progress
Improving today’s data protection environments is critical to ensuring the future of any organisation. Cybersecurity has the potential to be a catalyst for innovation, not a barrier to digital transformation.
Dell Technologies can support organisations in their innovation journeys, making it simple to modernise data protection with solutions for any workload deployed across multi-clouds, data centres, and the Edge. We share the knowledge and tools to transform cybersecurity challenges into a game-changing competitive advantage.
Find out more about how Dell Technologies can support your cyber resilience capabilities here.
