Ransomware Recovery Rates Are Falling Even as Backup Spending Rises
October 6, 2026
Rodney Hall, COO— AI-assisted and reviewed prior to publication.
Ransomware recovery is getting worse, not better, and the reason is not a lack of backup infrastructure. Independent survey data shows attackers now target backup repositories in the overwhelming majority of incidents, and the share of victims who fully recover their data is shrinking year over year. The fix is not another purchase order. It is treating backup infrastructure as a hardened, tested, access-controlled system rather than a background IT chore.
Why is ransomware recovery getting harder when backup adoption is up?
Recovery is getting harder because attackers have shifted their objective from encrypting production data to destroying the recovery path itself before they ever trigger encryption. A 2025 Veeam-sponsored survey found that an overwhelming 89% of organizations had their backup repositories targeted by ransomware actors, and on average, 34% of backup repositories were modified or deleted by attackers. That means backup destruction is now a standard step in the attack sequence, not an edge case.
At the same time, an Omdia study covered by StorageReview found recovery outcomes moving in the wrong direction. 83 percent of surveyed organizations experienced a successful ransomware attack in the past 24 months, up from 66 percent in 2024, and only 39 percent of impacted organizations managed to restore at least 75 percent of their compromised data, down from 57 percent in 2024. Organizations are buying more protection and recovering less of their data. That divergence is the story, and it points at execution, not tooling.
Sophos data adds another piece. Its 2025 State of Ransomware report found that only 54% of companies used backups to restore their data, the lowest percentage in six years. Fewer victims are even attempting backup-based recovery, likely because so many discover their backups have already been touched by the attacker by the time they need them.
What actually breaks a ransomware recovery plan
Three operational failures show up repeatedly across incident data, and none of them are about whether an organization owns backup software.
Backups sit reachable from the same credentials attackers already stole. If a domain administrator account can reach the backup console, so can an attacker who has escalated privileges, which is exactly the access path ransomware groups use to find and disable backup jobs before encrypting production systems.
Recovery has never been tested end to end. A completed backup job is not the same as a working restore. Federal guidance is explicit on this point: CISA's #StopRansomware Guide instructs organizations to maintain offline, encrypted backups of critical data, and regularly test the availability and integrity of backups in a disaster recovery scenario. Regular testing, not just regular backing up, is the control CISA names directly.
Offline and immutable copies are inconsistently applied. The same CISA guide notes that it is important that backups are maintained offline, as many ransomware variants attempt to find and subsequently delete or encrypt accessible backups to make restoration impossible unless the ransom is paid. That advice has been public for years. The fact that recovery rates are still falling suggests it is not being implemented consistently, especially outside the largest enterprises.
This is not a small-scale problem confined to under-resourced organizations. Ransomware remains a leading cause of breaches broadly: CISA reports that according to Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware figured into 44% of the breaches they investigated. And federal advisories keep repeating the same core mitigation. A joint advisory on the Play ransomware group, issued by CISA, the FBI, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre, told organizations to maintain offline backups and validate their recovery plan, reinforcing that maintaining offline backups of data and implementing a recovery plan reduces the likelihood and impact of ransomware incidents.
Backup infrastructure needs the same access discipline as production systems
The operational shift that closes the gap is architectural, not procedural. Backup software, backup storage, and the credentials that manage both need to sit outside the blast radius of a compromised domain, with segmented access and retention locks that even an administrator account cannot override during the retention window.
That means:
- Backup consoles run on accounts that are not also domain administrators, and multi-factor authentication is enforced on every one of them, not just user-facing systems.
- Recovery point retention uses object lock or delete protection so a compromised credential cannot wipe backup history, a control CISA's ransomware guide calls out directly for storage resources attackers commonly target.
- Restore drills happen on a schedule, not after an incident, with the actual recovery time measured against the business's stated recovery time objective rather than assumed.
None of this is exotic. It is the day-to-day discipline of storage, backup, and disaster recovery operations, applied with a security mindset instead of a checkbox mindset. It is also exactly the skill set that separates someone who can operate cloud and hybrid infrastructure from someone who can only configure it.
Where this shows up in a security operations role
Whoever owns backup infrastructure in your organization is, functionally, a security control owner now, whether or not that title appears anywhere in their job description. Interviewers and hiring managers increasingly expect candidates in infrastructure and cloud operations roles to speak fluently about high availability, disaster recovery design, and storage access controls, not just how to schedule a backup job.
That is a large part of what CompTIA Cloud+ certification is built to validate. The exam objectives go beyond running backup software, covering how to design recovery architecture, apply access segmentation across storage tiers, and validate that a disaster recovery plan actually meets its stated objectives under realistic conditions. Those are precisely the gaps the current ransomware data is exposing at scale.
If you are mapping out how a certification like this fits your current role or your next one, the Forge University resources hub walks through how the domains line up against day-to-day infrastructure work, so you are not guessing which sections matter most for the job you actually do. And if you are ready to put a study plan in place rather than keep tracking industry reports from the sidelines, you can start training whenever you're ready.
The certification question is really a staffing question
Executives approving backup and disaster recovery budgets are not short on tooling options. Immutable storage, air-gapped copies, and cloud-to-cloud backup are all mature product categories with multiple vendors. What is harder to buy is a team that configures those tools correctly, tests them honestly, and treats the backup environment with the same access rigor as the production environment it protects.
The recovery statistics from Sophos, Veeam, and Omdia this year all point at the same conclusion from different angles. Backup adoption is not the bottleneck anymore. Operational maturity around access control, segmentation, and restore testing is. That is a staffing and training question before it is a procurement question, and it is one every organization holding sensitive data needs to answer before, not during, its next incident.