When confidence turns into a danger: The hole between cyber resilience readiness and actuality
Let me start with an uncomfortable truth: executive teams likely overestimate their organizations’ preparedness for a cyberattack. They’ve invested heavily in security tools, established formal resilience strategies, and conducted tabletop exercises.
Yet new global research shows a sobering reality: 63% of IT leaders say their executive teams overestimate their organization’s cyber readiness.
President and Chief Security Officer at Dell Technologies.
This disconnect highlights the ‘confidence-capability gap’—the disparity between business leaders’ confidence in their cyber resilience and their organization’s actual ability to execute during a real incident.
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If this gap isn’t actively addressed, organizations incur ‘resilience debt,’ the accumulation of untested assumptions, outdated recovery plans, and unvalidated strategies that leave them exposed.
Like technical debt, resilience debt accrues quietly over time. And if left unmanaged, it can become a material business risk.
The illusion of readiness
While virtually every organization surveyed—99% worldwide—reports having a cyber resilience strategy in place, this signal of maturity can be misleading. Strategy alone is not a substitute for operational readiness.
Only 40% of organizations successfully contained and recovered from their most recent cyber incident or resilience drill. More than half (56%) failed to recover effectively.
Consider the implications. You have a strategy. You’ve invested in tools. You’ve run tabletop exercises. Yet, when an incident occurs, the disconnect becomes apparent as organizations find themselves unable to execute their plans under operational pressure and unforeseen complex interdependencies.
The other theme I’ve observed relates to a lack of readiness for large scale scenarios. While traditional disaster recovery programs and best practices have led organizations to build and test plans for recovering single applications or, at best, a single data center, this approach is inadequate for large-scale cyber incidents.
Real-world attacks can disrupt entire networks, disabling hundreds of applications and multiple data centers simultaneously, conditions under which most plans have never been contemplated, never mind tested.
Prevention isn’t enough
For decades, cybersecurity strategy has been dominated by prevention — the idea that building strong defenses to prevent an attack is more important than preparing to recover when one takes place. In fact, global data reveals 78% of organizations invest more heavily in prevention than in recovery preparedness.
This imbalance is not lost on modern adversaries. Increasingly, they infiltrate backup catalogs, corrupt snapshots, and target recovery workflows intentionally — capitalizing on the gaps found in organizations’ recovery-related systems and processes.
True resilience requires a multi-faceted approach that purposefully balances investment in preventative, detective, and recovery capabilities in alignment with threat landscape realities.
The fragility of recovery assumptions
Here’s what the data suggests separates resilient organizations that recover from those that don’t.
Organizations that test their recovery frequently—monthly or more—achieve a 55% recovery success rate in their most recent cyber incident drill or actual event. Those that test infrequently fall to 35%.
What sets the more successful organizations apart is not necessarily a larger budget. It is the operationalization of resilience: the discipline to test, refine, and validate recovery. They assume their backups will be attacked and architect accordingly.
They use advanced capabilities, such as vaulting and AI engines, to help ensure the integrity and availability of their backups. They focus on recovery as a first-class citizen, like prevention.
This is what helps reduce resilience debt and creates real readiness.
What leaders need to do differently
Closing the confidence-capability gap requires a fundamental shift in how you think about resilience:
- Ensure your strategies and plans are built to account for modern threat scenarios, addressing wide-scale, disruptions and attacks on the backup environments themselves.
- Don’t build a plan that you’re not testing frequently and robustly. Paper without proof is a problem. Build a culture of continuous testing, learning, and improving.
- Align business leadership reporting to operational results, not plans. Never present a strategy or plan that hasn’t been robustly tested.
- Recognize your recovery systems are a sophisticated attacker’s top target. Modernize those systems’ architecture and capabilities to anticipate and withstand attacks.
The organizations that make this shift won’t just weather disruptions more effectively, they’ll be positioned to pursue growth initiatives with greater confidence. Because resilience isn’t just about surviving an attack.
It’s about restoring trust in your systems so business leaders can lean on them with confidence as they lead their organizations into an increasingly digital future. The challenges outlined in this research aren’t inevitable.
With the right investments in recovery architecture and continuous validation and testing, organizations can dramatically accelerate recovery and reduce the operational, financial, and reputational impact of cyber incidents.
Organizations that operationalize these recovery principles will be positioned to best enable their business. The ones that don’t will keep building resilience debt until the day comes to pay it.
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