MSPs need to take the lead in mitigating ransomware risks
Traditional security measures are not deterring ransomware attacks, making it important for organisations to look to additional measures to back up and secure their data. Managed service providers have an important role to play in helping organisations find and implement solutions that reduce downtime and financial losses due to ransomware attacks.
This is according to Shaun Searle, country manager - African regions at Redstor, who was addressing a webinar for MSPs hosted by Redstor in partnership with ITWeb this week.
He noted that criminals had ramped up their efforts to take advantage of the uncertainty of the past year, with ransomware seeing a 600% rise during the pandemic and attacks taking place every 11 seconds globally.
The costs of ransomware now topped $75 billion a year; with businesses losing around $8 500 per hour on average due to ransomware induced downtime, said Searle. He highlighted instances in which organisations had suffered weeks of downtime as a result of ransomware attacks, and noted that even when organisations paid the ransoms, there was a risk they would not be able to retrieve all their data, or that malware would be embedded in their retrieved data.
“Prevention is better than cure, and this is never more true than in this environment. Despite all the current security measures in place, we are still seeing increases in ransomware attacks. An additional layer of data recovery is needed, even if a substantial investment has already been made in security.”
Polls of webinar participants revealed that 81% personally knew of an organisation that was hit by ransomware in the past 18 months and only 13% were extremely confident of their – or their customers’ – ability to recover from a digital attack. Over three quarters said their customers had a standard recovery point objective of under an hour, and 85% of their customers would find nothing over half a day’s downtime acceptable in the event of a ransomware attack. Around 33% said their customers would find downtime of only an hour or less acceptable in the event of an attack.
Said Searle: “MSPs are uniquely placed to add value and impart expert knowledge to clients. We personally are seeing more of enterprise cyber security committees sitting with MSPs and expecting to be made aware of their vulnerabilities, and to have subject matter experts make recommendations on ways to secure their environments and minimise risk. This presents a growing opportunity for MSPs to reinforce their expertise and role as a trusted partner, bringing both solutions and partners to the table.”
Searle highlighted Redstor’s channel model and opportunities for MSPs to partner with the company to offer a complete cloud based data management solution including unified backup, DR, archiving and insight into their data with rapid recovery, all managed from a single pane of glass with AI-enabled malware detection.
Redstor is a cloud data management platform for the channel that enables MSPs to generate margin-rich, repeat revenue by providing their customers with 4-in-1 data management. Redstor’s technology, used by more than 40 000 clients and offered by a network of 350 partners, live streams backup, archive and DR data, while offering insight into organisations’ entire data estates.
