According to a recent report by Cohesity, organizations need to strengthen their cyber resilience strategies. In comparing the cybersecurity outlook for 2023 to 2022, 93% of respondents said they felt the threat of ransomware attacks to their industry had increased in 2023. Almost half of respondents (45%) confirmed their business had been the victim of a ransomware attack in the prior six months. 

Respondents also revealed that their business’ cyber resilience and data security capabilities have not kept pace, with 80% expressing concerns about their organization’s cyber resilience strategy and whether it can ‘address today’s escalating cyber challenges and threats.

When asked how long their organization would take to recover data and business processes if a cyberattack occurred, over 95% of respondents revealed their business would need over 24 hours, 71% said it would take more than 4 days and a fourth (41%) of respondents said over a week would be required.

Two-thirds of respondents (67%) lack full confidence that their company could recover their data and critical business processes in the event of a system-wide cyberattack. Diving deeper into cyber resilience and data recovery expectations versus reality, 90% of respondents said their business would consider paying a ransom, with close to 3 in 4 (74%) saying ‘Yes’ their organization would pay, if it meant being able to recover data and business processes, or recover faster.

When asked about the biggest barriers to their organization being able to get back up and running in the event of a successful cyberattack, respondents said their top three challenges were integration between IT and security systems (34%), a lack of coordination between IT and security (33%) and antiquated backup and recovery systems (32%). Further clarity was provided by respondents regarding their ability to secure their data estates, with less than half stating they are confident all their data stored in the cloud (44%) or at the edge (42%) is secure and protected and less than three in 10 (28%) are confident data stored on-premises is secure and protected.

Consequently, 87% of respondents said that to help win the war against ransomware, data and cybersecurity vendors must collaborate to provide complete and integrated anti-ransomware solutions and nine in 10 respondents feel their business would benefit from a data security and management platform that provides insights on their overall security posture and cyber resilience.

While almost three in four (74%) respondents confirmed their company has cyber insurance, close to half (46%) of all respondents said it is now harder to obtain cyber insurance than it was in 2020. Respondents also shared that the three most critical technologies or capabilities required to secure cyber insurance are “strong encryption” (40%), the “ability to verify the integrity of backups” (38%) and MFA (37%) as their top needs.

Read the full report here.