Acronis, a data protection and cybersecurity vendor, has published its Cyber Protection Week Global Report 2022, a survey it runs each year. The headline figure is that 76 per cent of organisations experienced downtime because of data loss in the past year, which the company describes as a 25 per cent increase on the previous year, with causes spanning system crashes, human error and cyberattacks.

The report's argument is about tool sprawl. It says 78 per cent of organisations run as many as ten separate solutions for data protection and cybersecurity, and that more solutions have not produced more protection — a finding matched by its second result, that 61 per cent of information technology teams now want a single integrated console instead. Acronis' vice-president of cyber protection, Candid Wuest, frames the conclusion as support for consolidation.

A survey by a company that sells the fix

The findings are self-reported, gathered by the vendor, and they point at the product the vendor sells. That does not make them wrong; a survey is one way to see practice, and the figures are specific enough to be useful. But a company that finds its customers are buying too many point tools and would be better served by one suite is reporting a result that flatters its own business, and readers should weigh the sample and the questions, neither of which the release sets out.

Some of the detail is more telling than the headline. Half of organisations spend less than a tenth of their information technology budget on security, and only around a quarter spend more than 15 per cent. Only a tenth of users back up daily, and 41 per cent back up rarely or never. Those are statements about habit, and habits are what integrated tools are meant to change; whether the answer to under-investment is a different product or a different budget is the question the report leaves open.