Fenix24™, a global leader in operational recoverability, has released The State of Recoverability 2026, a research report based primarily on the company’s field data from more than 500 ransomware recoveries and 800 client engagements.
The report comes as boards, insurers, and regulators increasingly evaluate cybersecurity resilience based not only on an organization’s ability to prevent attacks, but also on how effectively it can recover when an incident occurs. Gartner has advised security leaders to measure resilience by the speed of business recovery rather than solely by whether a breach was prevented. Meanwhile, research from the Cyentia Institute indicates that the annual probability of experiencing a significant cyber event has nearly quadrupled since 2008.
Fenix24’s recovery data highlights several areas where documented recovery strategies can fail during an active cyberattack. Key findings from The State of Recoverability 2026 include:
• Identity recovery plans are largely absent. 99.2% of Fenix24 clients entering a recovery engagement have no documented plan for restoring identity systems. Among the organizations that had a plan, none were able to maintain it once the attacker came into contact with the environment.
• Privileged access controls remain weaker than network ingress controls. 95% of Fenix24 clients lack meaningful multifactor controls for critical infrastructure consoles, compared with just 15% that lack sufficient controls at network ingress. This creates a security gap in which the network perimeter receives stronger protection than the management plane.
• Identity systems emerge as a consistent recovery challenge. Active Directory or an equivalent identity system is involved in effectively every recovery conducted by Fenix24. In addition, 94% of clients have backup infrastructure joined to the same production directory that is compromised by the attacker in the initial stages of an incident.
• Identity reconstruction consumes critical recovery time. During a typical engagement, approximately one-fifth of the first 48 hours is dedicated solely to the identity plane, including establishing an authentication source that is sufficiently healthy to demonstrate positive control. Rebuilding infrastructure to minimum viable operation takes 72 hours or longer.
• Organizations routinely underestimate recovery timelines. Across more than 800 client engagements, only four came close to the 24- to 48-hour recovery time objective that organizations typically document ahead of an incident. None of those engagements achieved full operational capacity within that timeframe, with full recovery taking several weeks.
• Complete application dependency maps are unavailable at the start of recovery. Fenix24 found that zero clients arrived at a recovery engagement with a complete view of their applications and dependencies. In the closest cases, existing dependency information had either been lost during the attack or had to be reconstructed while recovery was already underway.
• Backup survival does not guarantee backup usability. In 38% of engagements where backups remained largely intact following an attack, those backups were nevertheless unable to support the recovery. Issues included outdated data, incomplete backups, incompatible backup types, or restoration times that exceeded the time required to rebuild systems directly.
• Physical infrastructure can become a recovery bottleneck. Storage capacity was insufficient for recovery requirements in 82% of engagements, while 38% lacked sufficient network bandwidth to transfer data at the scale required for recovery.
“For twenty years, boards asked whether they were secure enough to keep attackers out,” said Mark Grazman, CEO and co-founder of Fenix24. “That’s the wrong question now, because every organization eventually faces an attack. The question that matters is how fast the business gets back to operating, and most boards can’t get a straight answer to it. AI is only sharpening the problem: attackers move faster every year, and a recovery plan built around days, not hours, is already out of date. Recoverability has to be a board-level metric, not an assumption.”
Fenix24 describes the approach required to address these weaknesses as recoverability intelligence. The discipline centers on continuously measuring, using evidence, what an organization can actually restore and how quickly it can do so, rather than relying on annual attestations that may not accurately reflect real-world recovery capabilities.
The report follows Gartner’s recent recognition of Fenix24 as Cool Vendor™ in the Gartner Coolest Vendor Innovations in Cyber Resilience report, highlighting its Argos99™ Cyber Resilience and Recovery Intelligence Platform. Gartner recognized the platform for its approach to continuously demonstrating recoverability rather than relying on assumptions about an organization’s ability to recover.
The full State of Recoverability 2026 report is available at https://fenix24.com/recoverability-report-2026/. Organizations can also use Fenix24’s Recoverability Intelligence Assessment to benchmark their recovery posture against conditions observed in real-world ransomware incidents.
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About Fenix24
Fenix24, a global leader in operational recoverability, has redefined cyber resilience with the world’s first Recovery Dependency Modeling and Recoverability Intelligence Platform, built by a team that has led more than 500 ransomware recoveries, including 30 of the Fortune 500. Powered by Argos99 and the Resiliency Operations Center, Fenix24 leverages live telemetry from more than 70 enterprise systems, recovery dependency intelligence, and continuous backup posture analysis to deliver continuous validation of recovery readiness, hardened backup infrastructure, and board-level assurance of recoverability.
Purpose-built by frontline recovery experts and deployed across hybrid cloud and on-premise environments, Fenix24’s platform delivers measurable improvements in recovery readiness and faster, more confident restoration when ransomware strikes.
Regulators, insurers, and boards now demand proof of recoverability. Fenix24 provides it.
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