By design, data backup functions have traditionally been siloed and hidden away. But in the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the surge in ransomware attacks has brought backup and recovery functions into the light of top leadership and forced organizations to rethink their data protection strategies. No longer is data recovery just a technical necessity, but its also now a critical business continuity concern at the board level.
Boards of directors are now recognizing that security concerns extend beyond preventing data breaches to include swift and effective data recovery. The 2025 Risk to Resilience Report found that 89% of organizations had their backup repositories targeted during a ransomware attack, and one-third of their backups were either modified or deleted. Even as the median ransom payment dropped by 45%, this report highlights that 69% of organizations who paid a ransom were attacked again. This underscores a hard truth: Resilience is about having a trusted recovery plan, not a ransom payment option.
Ever Growing Compliance Regulations Further Board Concerns
Cyberattacks don’t just disrupt operations — they expose compliance gaps and trigger regulatory consequences. The Risk to Resilience Report reinforces this, showing increased global enforcement efforts and emerging legal consequences around ransom payments.
Meanwhile, the Splunk 2025 CISO Report highlights how compliance continues to drive boardroom decisions. In fact, regulatory compliance is still viewed as the top board-level priority over security best practices. However, many CISOs disagree. Only 15% of CISOs ranked compliance status as their top performance metric, while 45% of board members did — this is a clear misalignment between technical leadership and the board.
This disconnect has real implications. Boards are increasingly concerned about personal liability for cyber incidents, and new global regulations are mandating faster incident reporting and greater accountability.
Examples of new legislations being passed include:
- NIS2 (EU): Requires ICT risk management, mandatory incident reporting, and network security measures.
- DORA (EU): Mandates financial institutions to ensure operational resilience, conduct resilience tests, and report cyber incidents.
- CIRCIA (US): Requires critical infrastructure providers to promptly report cyber incidents.
- HIPAA Security Rule (U.S.): Proposed update includes a 72-hour recovery mandate for cyberattacks on ePHI.
- SEC Cyber Disclosure Rule (U.S., 2023): Boards must disclose oversight responsibility, incident reporting within four days, and risk assessment details.
- IT Act Cyber Rules (India): Cyber incidents must be reported within six hours, with mandatory 180-day log retention.
- Network Security Law (China): Imposes strict cybersecurity obligations, incident reporting, and information-sharing mandates.
- APPI (Japan): Businesses must report cyber incidents that jeopardize personal data unless advanced encryption is used. Directors may be liable for negligence.
Cyber Recovery Requires Additional Planning
What these additional regulations highlight is that additional controls and processes need to be implemented to deal with increasing cyberthreats. Cyber recovery isn’t like typical data loss — it’s an active, hostile attack. The unpredictable nature of these incidents makes recovery times hard to predict. Recovery efforts are often put on hold since impacted data is often put in confinement and is inaccessible while security and forensics team understand the scope of the attack and eradicate the threat actor. This makes it critical to have a separate, secure backup that can be quickly restored. Without this, recovery becomes uncertain, and this prolongs downtime and increases the risk of business disruptions.
Why cyber recovery is different than disaster recovery (DR):
- Recovery point is unknown.
- Recovery time is longer due to security and compliance teams running forensics and ensuring there is no chance of reinfection.
- Standard failover protocols don’t work since recovery needs to be selective and requires scanning workloads.
- Auditing compromised accounts/data, and data exfiltration is given priority over recovery.
- Unknown scope and effort at the time of infection.
- Is much more frequent than traditional DR events such as natural disasters or power outages.
Cyber Recovery Critical Questions and Metrics: What Boards Need to Know
Ransomware has changed the game. Backup is no longer just an IT function, it’s a business survival strategy. Despite significant investments in detection and prevention, threat actors continue to find ways in; no organization is immune. Boards can no longer afford to treat cyber resilience as a back-office concern. Today, they must take an active role in ensuring the organization can recover quickly, minimize financial and operational damage, and meet regulatory demands.
To drive informed decision-making, board members must ask the right questions and track key metrics that reflect cyber risk and recovery readiness.
Critical Cyber Recovery Questions for the Board
- Accountability and oversight: Who owns cyber risk and recovery at the executive level?
- Asset protection: Are the organization’s critical assets known, mapped, categorized based on value/cost of downtime, and assigned to clear owners?
- Threat awareness: What are the top cyber threats, and how prepared are we to mitigate them?
- Regulatory compliance: Are we meeting all security incident reporting and compliance obligations?
- Incident response and testing: How often are recovery plans tested, and does testing include both disaster and cyber recovery? What were the latest results?
- Workforce readiness: How are employees trained to identify and report cyber incidents?
- Technology investments: How is the organization leveraging automation and AI for cyber resilience?
- Decentralized cyber decisions: How are cybersecurity decisions managed as more tech choices shift outside central IT?
Key Cyber Resilience Metrics
Resilience isn’t just a plan — it’s measurable. Speaking the language of recovery means understanding these key metrics and what they reveal about an organization’s ability to withstand disruption.
| Metric | Definition | Why it’s Important |
|---|---|---|
| Recovery Time Objective (RTO) | Maximum time to restore operations after an attack | A fast recovery minimizes financial and reputational damage |
| Recovery Point Objective (RPO) | Maximum acceptable data loss before business impact | Limits data loss to ensure continuity and regulatory adherence |
| Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) | Average time to restore affected systems | A lower MTTR reflects an efficient response strategy, which reduces business risk |
| System Uptime service level agreement (SLA) % | Availability commitments vs. actual performance | Ensures reliability and prevents revenue loss from downtime |
| Cost Per Outage | Financial impact of downtime events | Quantifies financial risk to guide investment in resilience |
| Recoverability Testing Rates | Frequency and success rate of recovery drills | Validates recovery readiness to minimize disruption |
| Total Impact Assessment | Likelihood x Impact | Evaluates financial, operational, and reputational damage |
Moving Beyond Metrics to Data Resilience
The ultimate outcome of any data resilience program is to determine how fast you can recovery when an unplanned event causes data loss. Building a resilient data protection strategy is more critical than ever in the face of escalating cyberthreats. A tiered backup strategy with different recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) ensures critical data can be restored quickly, which minimizes downtime and helps businesses align with compliance requirements. For example, continuous data protection (CDP) for mission-critical systems, hourly snapshots for essential data, and daily backups for everything provide layered protection and rapid recovery options.
Regular recovery drills are equally essential. Simulating data loss scenarios helps identify weaknesses and refine processes to ensure the organization is prepared to respond effectively to real-world incidents. These exercises also demonstrate to the board that recovery capabilities are tested, reliable, and compliant.
Many organizations rely on the cloud for data recovery in an incident but often haven’t properly tested their recovery plans or accounted for the potential costs of restoring data at scale. A well-planned and validated cloud recovery strategy ensures your data remains both secure and rapidly accessible during severe disruptions. Cloud-based backup services add a critical layer of resilience too. Offsite, secure backups protect against physical threats while offering advanced security features such as encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA). This approach ensures data remains safe and accessible, even during severe disruptions.
Finally, clear communication protocols are vital. Keeping the board informed during recovery efforts — providing updates on compromised data, recovery progress, and prevention measures — demonstrates control and builds confidence. A structured communication plan ensures swift, coordinated responses, and reinforces compliance with regulatory demands.
Conclusion
The ability to recover from disruption is no longer a technical discussion — it is a core measure of operational resilience and business risk. As the threat landscape evolves and regulatory pressures increase, organizations must continuously validate that their recovery strategies can deliver when it matters most.
To explore how leading organizations define, measure, and improve their recovery readiness, view the webinar: From the Basement to the Boardroom: Data Backup and Recovery Metrics That Matter.