New Delhi, June 4 (TIWN) Ransomware remains the single biggest threat for organisations globally and an average ransomware attack costs over $80,000 (a little over Rs 60 lakh) to restore data, a new report said on Thursday.

The top challenge that would impact firms within the next 12 months is cyber threats (32 per cent) followed by shortage of skills to implement technology (30 per cent) and meeting changing customer needs (29 per cent), according to the ''Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report''.

Over half (51 per cent) of respondents said digital transformation can help their organisation transform customer service. Almost half of the respondents said it could transform business operations (48 per cent) and deliver cost savings (47 per cent), said the survey with more than 1,500 global enterprises to understand their approach toward data protection and management today.

Over a third (39 per cent) of respondents said the ability to improve reliability of backups is the most likely reason to drive their organisation to change its primary backup solution.

"As the demands of a modern enterprise gets complex, it''s not enough for data to be backed up, data must in fact move to the higher state of intelligence and automatically anticipate demand, securely across physical, virtual and cloud environments," explained Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President and Managing Director, Veeam India and SAARC.

"A simple, flexible and reliable Cloud Data Management solution is critical to build a robust foundation for today''s digital business," he added.

According to the survey, almost every company admitted to experiencing downtime, with 1 out of every 10 servers having unexpected outages each year - problems that last for hours and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many organisations (40 per cent) still rely on legacy systems to protect their data without fully appreciating the negative impact this can have on their business.