Cyber Resiliency
5 Gaps to Bridge in Enterprise Cyber Resiliency Strategies
In 2024, a single account without multi-factor authentication brought down one of the largest healthcare systems in the US: disrupting pharmacy services, delaying patient care, and cost over $800 million.
Despite billions spent on cybersecurity tools, organizations continue to fall victim to ransomware, data theft, and operational disruption. That’s why the focus has shifted from pure prevention to cyber resiliency.
Cyber resiliency is the ability to prepare for, withstand, respond to, and recover from attacks. But even as resiliency becomes a boardroom priority, critical gaps remain in the datacenter. In this article, we’ll explore five of the most common—and costly—cyber resiliency gaps, and how to close them before they become headlines.
Read more: What is Cyber Resiliency? | Index Engines
Hybrid cloud attacks exploit compromised credentials to move between cloud and on-prem systems, while poor visibility—especially around unmonitored assets—lets attackers operate undetected for months.
Cloud and SaaS platforms are now the lifeblood of modern business operations. But for many organizations, they’re also the soft underbelly of their cyber resiliency strategy. According to one study, 83% of organizations experienced a cloud-related security incident in the past year, with 23% of those stemming from human error and misconfigurations (SentinelOne).
What makes cloud especially dangerous is the hybrid nature of attacks today. Attackers use compromised cloud credentials to jump between cloud apps and on-prem systems, leveraging Single Sign-On (SSO) and VPN tunnels to blend in. One compromised SSO login can act like a skeleton key, unlocking access to dozens of connected systems.
Even worse, cloud visibility is still shockingly low. According to another report, over 32% of cloud assets are unmonitored (SentinelOne). Therefore, it comes as no surprise the average time to identify and contain a breach is still hovering at a staggering 241 days. That’s eight months an attacker can snoop, steal, and stage without raising an alarm (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025).
Overexposed internal file shares give attackers and insiders easy access to sensitive data, making access control, monitoring, and secrets management essential for reducing risk.
In many organizations, internal file shares are inherently trusted yet act as a digital Wild West. Sensitive data like customer records, IP, credentials, and more live in sprawling SharePoint folders and network drives that are accessible by far too many people.
One study found the average employee can access 11 million files. Another revealed 17% of sensitive files are accessible to all employees by default. In the financial services industry alone, 64% of firms had 1,000+ sensitive files exposed internally (Varonis).
Of course, the risk of an insider threat isn’t the only concern. Attackers who compromise a single endpoint can then freely navigate shared drives to find the crown jewels, including spreadsheets with passwords or API keys that should never be there and that other access controls cannot mitigate.
Weak IAM practices—like missing MFA, excessive privileges, and unsecured third-party access—make it easy for attackers to log in, move laterally, and escalate privileges undetected.
While we say bad actors are breaking in, what they’re really doing is logging in. Four out of five breaches now involve compromised credentials (CrowdStrike interview, CSO Online). Yet standard precautions like MFA are still not consistently deployed. In fact, 48% of organizations don’t even enforce MFA for access to mission-critical internal systems (Cohesity).
Privileged access specifically is a concern. Accounts accumulate entitlements over time, and ghost accounts linger long after employees leave. One study found 60% of companies had 500+ accounts with passwords that never expire, including service accounts with elevated access (Varonis). Combined with a lack of MFA and you have a recipe for disaster.
Identity and access weaknesses don’t stop at your organization’s edge either. Third-party and supply chain access is often granted without the same internal rigor—no MFA, no conditional access, and limited oversight. It’s no surprise that supply chain attacks are up 400%+ since 2021 (insurancebusinessmag.com). These external identities become easy entry points for attackers to move laterally or escalate privileges. Yet only 45% of organizations integrate third-party risk into incident response and continuity plans (Accenture). If your IAM strategy stops at the firewall, it’s incomplete.
Without deep content-level validation, organizations risk restoring corrupted backups or snapshots after a ransomware attack—making AI-powered integrity checks essential for safe recovery.
When hit by ransomware, you’ll look to restore from your last known clean backup or snapshot. Of course, that’s the trick, isn’t it? How do you know which is your last clean backup or snapshot?
That answer depends on your ability to validate the integrity of your data.
Instead of deep validation, many traditional tools rely on surface-level checks for ransomware like metadata scans, anomaly detection, or signature matching. Unfortunately, today’s ransomware knows you’re relying on those basic indicators. Modern variants are engineered to bypass these detection methods using shadow encryption, header obfuscation, polymorphic code, and other techniques that avoid triggering traditional indicators of compromise.
Of course, if you can’t confidently verify the data integrity of your backups or snapshots, then you can’t confidently restore them. Without analyzing the content of the data itself, there’s no real way to know whether the data is intact or subtly corrupted. Attempting to restore data without this certainty is how reinfection and extended outages happen. Organizations must have the ability to verify the integrity of their backup or snapshot data with high accuracy, rather than simply the ability to hunt for threats.
Read more: How CyberSense Uses AI to Validate Data Integrity and Support Recovery
Many organizations overlook critical systems and data in their recovery planning, leaving blind spots that can derail response efforts, with very few feeling confident they could recover all of their essential data.
According to recent research from theCube Research, only 4% of organizations said they can ensure a clean, restorable copy of data for more than 90% of their mission-critical applications. That’s a sobering reality check.
While there’s likely no single root cause, in talking with customers there’s often inconsistent resiliency measures being applied across critical systems and data sets. On one hand, as organizations grow, certain core systems receive mature, well-tested backup and recovery coverage. Other the other, newer or rapidly adopted platforms may be missed, improperly assessed, mis-budgeted, or simply passed over for other reasons.
These blind spots typically arise from siloed or rushed planning, unclear ownership, or legacy assumptions about what counts as “mission critical.”
What starts as a small oversight snowballs over time. A departmental application, a forgotten file share, or a lightly used SaaS service can all store business-essential data yet get excluded from regular validation or recovery workflows. When an attack hits, organizations quickly realize they don’t actually know how much of their critical data is truly recoverable.
This is often a strategic problem, rather than a technical one. If organizations don’t fully map, protect, and verify their most critical assets, they are functionally accepting partial recovery as their default posture. Put simply, filling this gap means moving beyond checkbox resilience and being honest about your recovery readiness. This is what places you into the 4% of organizations prepared to respond to, recover from, and minimize the impact of a cyberattack.
Without a tested incident response plan, organizations face costly delays and confusion during cyberattacks—yet most still lack formal IR strategies, despite proven savings of $2.66M per breach.
A quote often repeated in military circles says it best: We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.
Yet in the battle against cybercriminals, 77% of organizations don’t have a formal, consistently applied incident response (IR) plan (Cybint Report, Varonis). Lack of coordination across IT, security, C-suite, PR, and legal creates delays, confusion, and finger-pointing. It’s no wonder 69% of ransomware victims end up paying the ransom, despite policies against it (Cohesity).
On the other hand, organizations with dedicated IR teams and regularly tested response plans saved on average $2.66 million per breach compared to those without similar preparation (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023).
Unvetted AI tools and careless data sharing are exposing sensitive information, while attackers weaponize AI to craft smarter threats—making AI governance and properly trained defensive AI essential.
Generative AI is both a powerful productivity tool and a growing security risk. Employees are pasting sensitive data into AI tools. Attackers are using AI to write malware, craft hyper-personalized phishing, and even manipulate internal AI models with poisoned data.
The result is everyone is vulnerable. In 2025, 99% of orgs had sensitive data exposed in ways AI tools could discover. And 98% had unvetted AI tools in use somewhere in the org (Varonis).
Read More: Inside the CyberSense Research Lab’s Patented Process to Combat AI with AI
Cybersecurity priorities are often clouded by urgency, noise, and shifting threats. But the gaps outlined here reflect consistent places where nearly every organization can benefit from renewed focus. Use them to bring teams into alignment and prioritize what truly drives cyber resiliency.
No strategy will ever be flawless, but the best ones are adaptable. Cyber resiliency comes from clarity, consistency, and partnerships that grow with you. Choose tools and vendors who are committed to evolving alongside your business.
We work with security and infrastructure teams every day to help build their cyber resiliency strategies. Our flagship product, CyberSense, helps organizations recover from ransomware quickly and confidently by ensuring trusted data integrity with 99.99% accuracy —so you can identify clean recovery points, restore clean data, and minimize the impact of a cyberattack. CyberSense is purpose-built to fill the exact gap that traditional recovery methods overlook.
