A recent survey of 1,000 security and IT respondents across 11 countries pinpointed five key capabilities, also called resiliency markers. When deployed together, these resiliency markers helped companies recover faster from cyberattacks, according to the 2024 Cyber Recovery Readiness Report by Commvault, in collaboration with GigaOm. Companies with these capabilities experienced fewer breaches compared to other companies that did not follow the same path.
“As we drill down into these cyber capabilities, key practices are emerging as fundamentally critical to any cyber preparedness strategy, and testing for cyber recovery readiness is one of them,” said Tim Zonca, VP, Portfolio Marketing, Commvault. “Companies that just focus on testing for disaster recovery are missing the boat. Given the evolving nature of cyber threats, frequent and modern testing practices for cyber recovery are essential so environments are not re-infected and recovery processes are robust.”
These five resiliency markers emerged after data analysis teams combed through survey results across a range of topics including: how often companies were breached, what resilience technologies were (or were not) deployed, and how rapidly businesses were able to recover data and resume normal operations. The resiliency markers are as follows:
- Security tools that enable early warning about risk, including insider risk.
- A known-clean dark site or secondary system in place.
- An isolated environment to store an immutable copy of the data.
- Defined runbooks, roles, and processes for incident response.
- Specific measures to show cyber recovery readiness and risk.
The survey also yielded the following observations:
- Faster recoveries: Cyber mature organizations, those that have deployed at least four of the five resiliency markers, recovered 41% faster than respondents with only zero or one marker.
- Fewer breaches: Overall, cyber mature organizations report experiencing fewer breaches compared with companies that have less than four markers.
- Better confidence about cyber readiness: 54% of cyber mature organizations were completely confident in their ability to recover from a breach, compared to only 33% of less prepared organizations.
- Frequent testing makes a big difference: 70% of cyber mature organizations tested their recovery plans quarterly, compared to 43% of organizations with only zero or one maturity marker, that tested with this same frequency.
“One of the key findings from the research is that in order to truly advance cyber preparedness, organizations can’t cut corners. We saw significant disparities in resilience between organizations that deployed one or two of the resiliency markers versus four or five,” said Chris Ray, Cybersecurity Analyst, GigaOm. “It’s critical that organizations think about resiliency in layers. Less than 85% of respondents surveyed do that today. This needs to rapidly change if companies want to be resilient and have the upper hand against bad actors.”
