Blog
February 26, 2024
Ransomware doesn’t just cost you the ransom — it can also lead to downtime, expensive recovery efforts, and permanent data loss. As these attacks become more common, it’s crucial for businesses to recognize the risks and avoid the real ransomware costs.
Ransomware Reality: What's Happening Today?
Ransomware incidents have left organizations wrestling between paying the ransom or enduring downtime. The harsh reality? The true costs extend far beyond the ransom amount.
Since 2016, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks have happened daily. And a host of new and evolving cybersecurity threats are continuing to put companies on high alert.
Just this year, a cyberattack forced the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline — one of the largest fuel pipelines in the United States — and led to widespread shortages at gas stations along the east coast. In order to quickly get systems up and running, Joseph Blount, the CEO of Colonial Pipeline, authorized the ransom payment of nearly $4.5 million to the hacker group. “It was one of the toughest decisions I have had to make in my life,” Blount said in a CNBC interview.
Resisting ransom payments is difficult. But paying the ransom contributes to the false promise that it will be quicker and easier to undo the damage—when in reality, it's about prioritizing the restoration of critical data, applications, and systems needed to run the business.
Why Paying Up Doesn’t Always Pay Off
Ransomware incidents have left organizations wrestling between paying the ransom or enduring downtime. The harsh reality? The true costs extend far beyond the ransom amount.
- Average Downtime: 21 days (Varonis).
- Cost of Recovery: Recovery costs can be up to 10 times the ransom amount, with the average reaching $1.85 million (Sophos).
Downtime is the most costly aspect of a ransomware attack. Recovering from a ransomware attack is 10 times the size of the ransom payment, according to Sophos.
The study also found the average total cost of recovery from a ransomware attack has more than doubled in a year, increasing from $761,106 to $1.85 million in 2021. It’s no surprise that this figure can potentially be much larger for organizations in certain industries, such as financial services, energy, and healthcare, where there’s a more direct impact on consumers.
These exorbitant costs highlight that paying the ransom doesn’t guarantee a quick resolution. Instead, the focus should shift to implementing robust recovery strategies to mitigate downtime and data loss.
Backups Alone Aren’t Enough to Mitigate Ransomware Costs
For more than 50 years, businesses have relied on backups to recover lost or corrupted data. However, modern ransomware attacks expose critical weaknesses in traditional backup systems:
Scale and Speed
Most enterprises might have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of transactions that occur in a single day. They can’t afford to protect data with a once-a-day backup. And many backup softwares have legacy security models, which make them vulnerable to compromise and for cyber attackers to demand and control snapshot data.
And even if it’s a successful backup, companies can only recover a file or a VM. Teams still need a way to stand up and configure the application and database servers to get an application fully up and running.
Data Gaps
A recent IBM study found the average time to detect and contain a data breach is 287 days (212 to detect, 75 to contain). The timestamp delta between the last known good backup and the production application state right before the attack can be large. This results in significant data gaps when restoring from backups.
Vulnerability of Backup Systems
Many backup solutions have outdated security models, leaving them prone to compromise.
Lack of Data Theft Protection
Lastly, backup solutions have no data theft protection. There is data sitting at risk in development and test environments, and there’s no way backup solutions can secure data once a cyber attackers have made their way into the environment.
Well stated by risk and security expert Paul Proctor in a recent blog post:
“You know when the first time most organizations test restore? After they’ve been hit by ransomware. And that is the single biggest factor in whether it devastates the organization or takes a couple of hours to clean up.”
“If you strengthen your backup and test restores on all your critical business processes, the cost of recovery will always be less than paying the ransom for an uncertain outcome.”
Restoration might recover files, but getting applications and systems operational requires far more. Without a holistic solution, businesses risk prolonged downtime and data loss.
The Modern Approach to Ransomware Recovery
Perforce Delphix offers a modern, fully automated data protection solution that allows organizations to minimize downtimes after an attack.
Real-Time Data Protection with Continuous Vault
Traditional backups are insufficient for enterprises facing modern ransomware threats. Delphix's Continuous Vault provides near-zero Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) by syncing enterprise data in real time into an immutable environment. This ensures that organizations always have clean, attack-free data to recover from, even seconds before an attack.
Instant Application Recovery
Unlike traditional backups requiring days for recovery, Delphix accelerates recovery objectives with Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) measured in minutes. Using integrated APIs, Delphix enables instant restoration across multiple enterprise applications, ensuring business-critical systems are back online with minimal downtime.
Integrated Data Masking
Ransomware attacks often target sensitive data for extortion. Delphix’s automated data masking replaces sensitive values (e.g., names, credit card details) with fictitious, yet realistic data. This ensures that even if cybercriminals steal information, it’s unusable, protecting the organization from extortion and regulatory penalties.
Granular Point-in-Time Recovery
Unlike legacy backups limited to daily snapshots, Delphix allows entire datasets to be recovered down to a specific transaction or second before an attack. This granular recovery minimizes data loss and eliminates the need to roll back systems by a full 24 hours.
Prevention for Non-Production Environments
A big vulnerability for ransomware attackers lies within non-production environments like development and testing. Delphix mitigates these risks with Continuous Compliance. By masking and securing non-production data, Delphix ensures hackers cannot access sensitive information through less-protected environments.
A Solution Enterprises Need
We've seen a number of large high-profile companies, like Uber, where malware finds its way in through lower environments first. The reason for this is that investments in security for dev/test environments are historically lower than for production systems. By leveraging data masking, the result is that all non-production applications are running with high-quality data that values nothing in the hands of malicious actors, dropping the overall risks for extortionware and lockerware to zero.
Key Benefits of Using Delphix for Ransomware Protection
Implementing Delphix enables enterprises to minimize financial and operational impact during ransomware incidents:
- 100x faster recovery times compared to traditional backup and restore solutions.
- Eliminate sensitive data risks with masking for compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulations.
- Centralized protection across systems with APIs for seamless integration into IT workflows (like ServiceNow and Jenkins).
- Cost efficiency by reducing storage needs and operational expenses tied to manual recovery processes.
Why Businesses Should Act Now
Ransomware attacks are escalating in both frequency and sophistication. Waiting until disaster strikes is no longer a viable option. By integrating Delphix’s advanced tools, enterprises are better positioned to:
- Save millions in downtime and recovery costs.
- Protect brand reputation from breach-related fallout.
- Avoid regulatory fines through secure and compliant data protection.
Don't just take our word from it. Find out how Michelin reduced downtime from 2 days to 2 hours and saved on costs by using Delphix.
Avoid the Biggest Ransomware Cost with Delphix
Ransomware attacks have become so common that it's no longer a matter of if but when, and the aftershocks are instant and painful. The pricey ransomware payouts, downtime costs from shutting down company operations, and permanent loss of company data can be detrimental to companies.
An organization's readiness level in each stage of the incident response process will determine whether one pays the ransom versus not. In other words, the less prepared you are, the easier it will be to pay the ransom.
Having a sound prevention and recovery plan for ransomware must be a top priority for every organization, and it should not stop at solely implementing traditional cybersecurity and backup applications. These two applications serve their purpose, but they can’t be relied on as the only solution.
Preventing long downtimes requires activating a recovery plan for your business-critical applications. A modern approach that leverages a fully automated, zero-trust recovery model is a must-have, and organizations can leverage tools like Delphix that are capable of automating the process in full—from detection to recovery.
Close Critical Data Protection Gaps
Ransomware costs aren’t just about ransom payments; downtime, data loss, and expensive recovery efforts can devastate businesses. Delphix provides continuous data protection for ransomware recovery, deleted data, and other types of data loss. With Delphix, organizations can quickly restore applications and data to a known clean state, minimizing financial and operational impact.
Enable Instant Recovery
Time is money when recovering from ransomware. Delphix enables instant recovery of applications and data to precise moments before an attack, achieving recovery time objectives (RTOs) in minutes — not days.
Neutralize Data Exfiltration Risks
Ransomware attacks often aim to steal sensitive data for extortion or exposure. Delphix mitigates this risk by detecting sensitive information and applying automated data masking. This replaces critical data with realistic but fictitious values, neutralizing its potential value to attackers.
Protect Your Data from Ransomware Costs
Discover why Delphix is the solution of choice for enterprises seeking to protect their most critical applications and data. Contact Delphix today to experience a modern, integrated approach to ransomware recovery with continuous data protection, instant recovery, and data masking.