A survey of more than 4,000 C-suite and senior IT leaders, published by Veeam to mark World Backup Day, has found that 76% of organisations believe they could not survive more than three days of complete data downtime. The finding places data outages ahead of economic recession as the risk that most concerns executives.
The numbers paint a picture of widespread anxiety paired with limited confidence in recovery capabilities. Nearly half of respondents (47%) expect a significant data breach or cyberattack in the coming year, yet only 32% believe their organisation could fully recover critical data and business operations after such an event. Ransomware and cyberattacks remain the most-cited threat at 67%, with AI-related risks — data leaks, algorithmic bias, uncontrolled automation — registering at 29%.
The gap between perceived threat and recovery confidence is arguably the survey's most striking finding. Organisations know they are vulnerable, but a combination of fragmented ownership, limited board engagement, and insufficient testing appears to be preventing meaningful progress. Just 31% of boards review resilience readiness on a quarterly basis, and responsibility for data resilience is typically spread across CIOs, CISOs, heads of risk, and COOs with no single point of accountability.
There is a human dimension too. Fifty-seven per cent of leaders reported that employees have resigned, threatened to resign, or experienced burnout following major cyber incidents — a figure that rarely surfaces in vendor surveys but speaks to the operational reality of living through a serious breach.
Backups are the last line of truth in a world where AI can fabricate, ransomware can encrypt, and a single misconfiguration can cascade across an entire infrastructure in minutes.
On the causes of data loss, external cyberattack leads at 26%, followed by human error at 23% and system or hardware failure at 16%. Eighty-three per cent of organisations experienced data outages that were not immediately resolved over the past five years.
The survey was conducted by Censuswide between November 2025 across organisations with at least 250 employees in the UK, US, Germany, France, Australia, and New Zealand. As with all vendor-commissioned research, the framing naturally supports the commissioning company's market position, but the sample size and geographic spread give the headline figures reasonable weight.
