Arcserve released a segment from its annual independent global research. The segment focuses on government IT departments' approach and experience with ransomware and data recovery preparedness. 

The findings reveal several weaknesses that can hamper government departments' fight against ransomware and their ability to recover data.

Key findings include:

• 36% of government IT departments do not have a documented disaster recovery plan.
• Only 38% of government IT departments have a comprehensive business continuity plan that includes recovery, interim solutions, and communication.
• 24% of remote government workers are not equipped with backup and recovery solutions.
• 45% of government IT departments mistakenly believe it is not their responsibility to recover data and applications in public clouds.
• 33% of government organizations require over a day to recover from severe data loss, despite 82% reporting that less than one day is an acceptable level of downtime for critical systems.
• Only 34% are very confident in their IT team's ability to recover all lost data in the event of a ransomware attack.

Said Patrick Tournoy, executive vice president for operations at Arcserve: "It's like opening yourself up to a one-two knock-out punch. Gaps in protecting remote workers and cloud-based apps and data create an ideal hunting ground for bad actors and ransomware, while not having documented and tested recovery plans leave an organization more vulnerable and poorly equipped to recover data."  

Arcserve urges government IT departments to prioritize data protection and rapid recovery by following three key steps: develop and regularly test a disaster recovery plan, implement the advanced 3-2-1-1 backup strategy to guard against ransomware, and utilize immutable storage to prevent data alteration.