A recent study by Cohesity reveals that many companies are not as prepared for cyber threats as they believe. Despite rising malicious activities, most organizations struggle to meet their business recovery goals when faced with ransomware or other attacks.

Key Findings:

•  Nearly 70% of IT and security leaders admitted their organizations paid a ransom in the past year, even though 80% had policies against it.

•  Almost half of the surveyed companies require more than six days to restore core business functions after an attack.

•  The survey, conducted by Censuswide, involved over 3,100 IT and security decision-makers from eight countries between June 27 and July 18.

Insights:

The report highlights a significant gap between companies' perceived and actual abilities to handle cyberattacks. While 80% of respondents expressed confidence in their resilience strategies, this confidence often stemmed from ambitious goals rather than practical performance.

Although 98% of respondents aimed to recover within a day after a cyber incident, nearly one-third acknowledged needing four to six days, and 31% required one to two weeks.

The importance of robust recovery strategies has been underscored by recent incidents, such as the February ransomware attack on Change Healthcare and the July IT outage affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices due to a faulty CrowdStrike software update.