Cybersecurity consistently ranks as the top concern among CIOs worldwide, but despite the high priority they place on ensuring their environments are safe from cybercriminals and hackers, only about one-third (35%) of IT organizations have implemented a comprehensive cyber recovery plan, according to PwC’s 2025 Global Digital Trust Insights report. This gap between awareness and preparedness leaves organizations vulnerable, especially as cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated.
To bridge this critical gap, IT leaders should focus on the five S’s —speed, security, scale, simplicity, and smarts — to strengthen their cybersecurity and response capabilities. Understanding and implementing these five S’s can mean the difference between a cyberattack causing a minor hiccup in business operations versus a multi-week disruption that costs millions.
The cost of delay: Why speed matters
The stakes couldn’t be higher when it comes to recovery speed. According to ITIC’s 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey, 90% of mid-size and large enterprises face costs exceeding $300,000 for each hour of system downtime. Despite these staggering figures, many organizations remain unprepared and struggle to achieve rapid recovery times in the aftermath of an event, in part due to fragmented tools built atop older, traditional file systems. The first order of business is to understand exactly what happened in the wake of a destructive cyber-attack. Without a clear, unified view of the infrastructure, that’s going to take a lot of time. And when the business is down due to an IT failure, there’s no time to lose.
The patchwork nature of traditional data management solutions makes testing response and recovery plans cumbersome and complex. As a result, when an actual attack occurs, these complications often prevent proper execution of the response and recovery plan.
To address these challenges, organizations need to implement a unified data security and management system that delivers consistent backup and recovery performance. Such systems should include global search capabilities for quick resource identification and automated verification of backup recoverability. After successfully removing the root cause of the attack, the ability to restore hundreds, or even thousands, of virtual machines quickly is essential.
Security: Protecting your backups is the last line of defense
As ransomware and malware evolve, attackers increasingly target backup systems — traditionally considered the last line of defense. This trend has forced organizations to fundamentally rethink their approach to backup security. According to Foundry’s 2024 Security Priorities study, protecting confidential and sensitive data remains the number one security priority for CIOs.
Modern security architectures deliver multiple layers of protection. Regarding encryption, IT should employ TLS for data in transit and AES-256 encryption for data at rest. A zero trust architecture supported by multi-factor authentication (MFA), separation of duties and least privilege access for both machines and roles will help prevent unauthorized users and machines from accessing the environment. Administrators should also harden their platform regularly, by applying patches and upgrades as they are published by their vendors.
Concerning data recovery, a fault-tolerant backup infrastructure ensures that backups both occur as expected and are in a recoverable state. After malware has encrypted critical data, no one wants to discover that recoverable backups don’t exist. Additionally, cybercriminals now employ malware that specifically targets backups, so it’s important to ensure that backups live in immutable storage, which prevents malicious encryption. Many organizations use a cyber vault for additional resilience. This vault stores an immutable copy of data that’s isolated from other copies. This further reduces your risk in the event of a destructive cyber-attack.
Scaling for tomorrow’s challenges
Traditional secondary storage infrastructures usually grow organically, resulting in disparate systems that require individual provisioning, configuration, and management for each silo. This fragmentation not only creates security vulnerabilities but also prevents efficient scaling.
The solution lies in implementing a unified platform for multiple data sources that is capable of supporting all of their data sources. Start by backing up virtual machines, physical servers, and enterprise systems of record that store your most sensitive information.
You’ll also want to secure and protect data stored in the cloud, and in your SaaS applications. Do a thorough evaluation of supported data sources here – you probably need to secure and protect data from more systems than you think. It’s common for an enterprise to have over 400 different sources.
Such systems should provide a single management console across all environments. In brief, enterprises need wide, broad, robust support through a single platform for all their hundreds of data sources.
Complexity remains the common thread underlying most cybersecurity and data management challenges. Overly complex storage, security, and backup systems kill efficiency, create overlooked security vulnerabilities, and make data difficult to locate and identify.
Organizations need to move away from the traditional approach of bolting security onto existing systems. Instead, they should seek unified data systems with API-first architectures that facilitate seamless integration and unified management.
The AI advantage: Adding smarts to security
Attackers are using AI to increase the specificity, sophistication and scale of their attacks, but, thankfully, AI can also provide powerful tools for enterprise security. Modern AI-driven security systems excel at detecting malware, ransomware and anomalies that could be the result of a breach. AI can gather and analyze threat intelligence that enables IT and security teams to take proactive action against future threats.
AI can also automatically classify data so that it’s appropriately tiered for the level of protection required, and it can improve capacity planning and optimization to ensure that IT always has the infrastructure it needs to protect and secure sensitive data.
Cohesity’s multi-cloud data management platform enables organizations to achieve significant improvements across all five S’s. In terms of speed, organizations have achieved 45% faster backups and 10 times faster data recovery. Security improvements have resulted in $2 million savings on cyber insurance costs, with many customers avoiding ransom payments entirely following attacks.
The platform’s scalability has enabled management of billions of objects across multiple nodes, and it makes management so simple, enterprises have been able to manage 63% more VMs per FTE. AI-driven smarts have delivered 48% faster threat remediation and 46% reduction in TCO.
But while it is a powerful platform, that doesn’t mean it’s complex to manage. Cohesity’s intelligent data management simplifies tasks and automatically brings together multiple data sources — structured, semi-structured and unstructured — to greater insights from all data and proactively defending data from bad actors. Because Cohesity consolidates siloed data management functions onto a single and scalable software platform, the entire data management lifecycle can be managed from a single, intuitive console.
As the threat landscape continues to evolve, enterprises must modernize their data management and infrastructure to meet these challenges head-on. The five S’s — speed, security, scale, simplicity and smarts — provide a framework for evaluating and implementing modern data protection solutions.
Organizations that successfully implement these principles position themselves to respond effectively to cyber threats while maintaining operational efficiency and data integrity. In an era where cyberattacks are not a matter of if but when, having a robust, modern approach to data protection isn’t just an IT priority — it’s a business imperative.
Successful cyber recovery requires more than just backup solutions; it demands a comprehensive, integrated approach that addresses all five S’s while maintaining the agility to adapt to emerging threats. As cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations that embrace this holistic approach to data security and protection will be best positioned to protect their assets and maintain business continuity in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
To learn more about how Cohesity can help strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity posture, read Cohesity’s Field Guide for AI-Powered Security.
