A survey of 1,500 IT (1,000) and IT security (500) decision-makers found more than half (52%) worked for organizations that experienced a cyberattack that prevented access to data within the past 12 months, with 85% of them admitting they paid ransoms to access data.

Conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Dell Technologies, the survey also found three-quarters (75%) of respondents worried existing data protection measures are unable to cope with ransomware threats. Well over two-thirds (69%) were not very confident they could reliably recover in the event of a destructive cyberattack, the survey found.

Overall, 81% of respondents also noted that the rise in remote workers increased their exposure to data loss from a cyberattack.

IT decision-makers are also concerned about cloud security, with 79% reporting they are not confident their organization can protect all the data across their public clouds. A total of 40% cited challenges with data security in public, multi-cloud environments. Well over half (57%) said protecting these environments was the most important capability for enabling operations.

Rob Emsley, director of product marketing for data protection at Dell Technologies, said the survey results suggested there is an imbalance between the focus on preventing cyberattacks and recovering from them. In fact, more organizations (59%) invested in preventative cybersecurity than they did in cybersecurity recovery, the survey found.

At this point, most organizations need to define a set of best practices for recovering from cybersecurity incidents, which are all but inevitable as attacks continue to increase in volume and sophistication. While more organizations are discussing the need to become more cyber resilient, there still isn’t enough focus on the role data protection plays in enabling organizations to achieve that goal, noted Emsley.

The survey found most organizations (93%) now have ransomware insurance policies to help mitigate the cost of an attack, but 57% also noted their insurance providers required proof of best practices for cyberthreat prevention, with 40% indicating there are some scenarios that would void the policy.

On the plus side, the survey found 50% have contracted with professional services providers to bolster capabilities, while nearly as many (49%) conducted regular cyber recovery testing. A total of 42% have deployed a cyber vault with physical and logical separation from production data.

More than half (52%) also said they believed generative artificial intelligence (AI) would improve their organization’s cybersecurity posture. Just under a third (27%) also noted generative AI will initially provide an advantage to cybercriminals. Overall, 88% said generative AI is likely to generate large volumes of new data that need to be protected.

It’s difficult to predict how cybersecurity will evolve in the age of AI, but the coming year promises to be challenging. Cybercriminals, unlike IT teams, are not nearly as constrained by budget issues. In fact, most of them are already, at the very least, experimenting with generative AI tools to launch more frequent attacks that are also going to be more difficult to detect. The issue IT teams will need to come to terms with is not only preventing those attacks as much as possible but, just as importantly, finding ways to recover from them as fast as possible.