Nine in ten organizations say they’re confident they could recover from a cyberattack. Fewer than one in three actually do — and AI is making the problem worse.
Organizations are dangerously overconfident about their ability to recover from ransomware attacks, according to new research that exposes a widening gulf between perceived and actual cyber resilience — a gap that artificial intelligence is making harder to close.
The findings come from Veeam Software’s Data Trust and Resilience Report 2026, based on interviews with more than 900 senior IT, security, and risk leaders worldwide. While 90 percent of organizations said they were confident in their ability to recover from a cyber incident within their recovery time targets, fewer than one in three ransomware victims fully recovered their data. On average, organizations retrieved just 72 percent of data affected by a ransomware attack.
The consequences of that shortfall are being felt across balance sheets and boardrooms. Among organizations that experienced a cyber incident, 42 percent reported disruption to customers, 41 percent reported financial losses or revenue impact, and 38 percent experienced extended outages of critical systems.
“Confidence in recovery from a ransomware attack is high, but the data tells a different story — and AI is only widening that gap,” said Anand Eswaran, Veeam’s chief executive. “Even the most sophisticated organizations are discovering that confidence in recovery and proof of recovery are fundamentally different capabilities.”
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The report arrives as AI is rapidly complicating the data security picture. Forty-three percent of respondents said AI adoption is outpacing their organization’s ability to secure data and models, while 42 percent reported limited visibility into the AI tools and models being used across their organization. Four in ten said security policies have not yet been updated to account for AI-specific risks — and a quarter flagged shadow IT and unauthorized AI tool use as a primary concern.
The infrastructure for deploying AI, Eswaran warned, has rapidly outpaced organizations’ ability to secure it.
The report does identify a path forward. Organizations that fared better in ransomware recovery shared four common traits: clear visibility into enterprise data and AI risk; enforceable security controls rather than policy documents alone; regular, realistic recovery testing; and executive-level alignment on what “recovered” actually means. Organizations that invested in tools such as data loss prevention reported meaningfully better outcomes than those that relied on policy commitments without technical enforcement.
Budget also proved to be a reliable predictor of resilience. Organizations that increased cybersecurity spending year over year were significantly more likely to achieve full data recovery following a ransomware attack — 40 percent, compared with just 16 percent among those that did not increase budgets. Nearly half of all respondents reported year-over-year budget increases, a signal that awareness of the risk is growing even if execution remains uneven.
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Regulatory pressure is emerging as an additional driver. A third of respondents cited regulatory shifts as a top emerging threat, a figure that nearly matches the share citing cyberattacks outright.
Veeam, which recently acquired data security firm Securiti AI, positioned the report as a call to action for business leaders to move beyond assumptions about resilience. “The organizations that will lead tomorrow,” Eswaran said, “are those proving trust, not just believing in it.”
