Migration to the cloud is at an all-time high and with it the growth of ransomware attacks. “The Vulnerability Lag,” an aptly named report from Veritas Technologies, which surveyed 2,000 global IT leaders whose organizations accelerated their digital transformations during the pandemic, found the majority are severely vulnerable to ransomware attacks. That’s mainly because organizations haven’t been able to keep pace with their own accelerated digital transformations in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Multi-cloud platforms make matters even worse. Businesses have been left trying to play catch up, while also dealing with the complexity of mastering cloud security, which is fundamentally different than on-premises security. In order to close that technology gap, the report posits that organizations would need to spend an average of $2.47 million in their technology strategy within the next 12 months. The average organization experienced nearly three ransomware attacks that led to downtime in the past 12 months. Ten percent were hit with ransomware more than five times. Making matters worse is the existing global IT talent shortage; enterprises are challenged to hire enough new IT talent to meet the cloud security vulnerabilities that invite ransomware. Experts say they are not surprised by the results of the survey, noting that most organizations are dealing with a ticking time bomb of security concerns and technical debt built up over years of fragmented cloud efforts.
