Arcserve Survey: Healthcare Industry's Ransomware Defenses Need More Preventative Action

  • Healthcare was the most targeted industry sector by ransomware last year
  • 45% of healthcare respondents suffered a ransomware attack in the past 12 months
    • two out of three paid the ransom
  • 82% of healthcare IT departments do not have an updated disaster recovery plan

Draper, UT – September 19, 2023 – Arcserve, the world's most experienced provider of backup, recovery, and immutable storage solutions for unified data resilience against ransomware and disasters, today released findings from its annual independent global research focusing on the healthcare sector's approach and experience of data protection, recovery, and ransomware readiness. The findings reveal gaps, vulnerabilities, and misconceptions in the healthcare sector, potentially hindering its ability to effectively safeguard and recover data in the event of malicious attacks and accidental data outages stemming from human error or natural events. 

Key findings include:

  • Prevalence: across all industry sectors, healthcare was the most targeted by ransomware attacks
    • 45% of healthcare respondents experienced a ransomware attack in the past 12 months. 
  • Impact: high ransom demands, no guarantee of recovery
    • 83% of ransom demands were between $100,000 - $1M
    • 67% paid the ransom
    • 45% did not recover all their data after ransomware attacks

Against this threat backdrop, there were apparent preparedness weaknesses

  • 82% of healthcare IT departments lack an updated disaster recovery plan
  • Nearly 75% of respondents believe data backed up to a public cloud is safer than data backed up on-prem
  • More than 50% of respondents mistakenly believe the cloud provider is responsible for recovering their data

Said Vitali Edrenkine, Chief Marketing Officer at Arcserve: "In the face of growing number and sophistication of ransomware attacks, the healthcare industry continues to grapple with inadequate data protection and recovery mechanisms. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure – but our latest market research shows that when it comes to ransomware resilience, too many healthcare institutions have neither. A robust backup and disaster recovery strategy is critical for healthcare organizations to build resistance to malicious attacks."

Arcserve advocates for a transformative 'unified data resilience' approach within the healthcare sector to bolster preparedness. By adopting a unified data resilience strategy, organizations strengthen their defensive posture and have the necessary tools to expedite data recovery in the aftermath of ransomware attacks.

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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 four 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 X.

Contact Information   
Jock Breitwieser   
Arcserve   
+1 408.800.5625   
jock.breitwieser@arcserve.com