Ransomware recovery is getting harder. A survey of 700 IT decision-makers published by Object First and conducted by Omdia finds that organisations increasingly treat backup storage as their last line of defence, but the gap between what they need and what they have is widening.
The study, conducted between February and March 2026 across the US, UK, Ireland, France and the DACH region, found that 83 percent of organisations surveyed suffered a successful ransomware attack in the past two years — up from 66 percent in 2024. Recovery outcomes have deteriorated alongside attack frequency: only 39 percent of affected organisations recovered at least 75 percent of their data, down from 57 percent in 2024. Two-thirds experienced outages exceeding their Recovery Time Objective; 76 percent saw their largest data-loss event exceed Recovery Point Objective targets.
Against that backdrop, 93 percent of respondents said absolutely immutable backup storage — defined by Omdia as backup data that cannot be modified or deleted even by a privileged administrator or an attacker with full IT credential access — is a critical requirement. The number actually meeting that standard: 16 percent.
Omdia describes the situation as an 'immutability gap': a growing distance between what organisations understand they need and what their current backup environments provide. The gap is partly a purchasing problem. Eighty-nine percent of respondents said vendor immutability claims require independent third-party validation before they can be trusted, which suggests confusion about what the label actually guarantees in practice.
The research covered respondents at organisations with 1,000 to 9,999 employees, split between IT decision-makers with influence over cybersecurity and data centre infrastructure purchasing, and line-of-business leaders at director level and above. Seventy-three percent of the latter group described absolutely immutable backup as a requirement for enterprise resilience strategy, indicating the concern has moved beyond the IT department.
Object First sells on-premises backup storage designed for use with Veeam Software. The commissioned research, while designed to support that positioning, draws on Omdia's methodology and survey sample.
To stay across the latest in cloud, AI and enterprise tech analysis from Compare the Cloud, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://www.comparethecloud.net/newsletter
