The Era of Hybrid Cloud Storage 2025 Report: Is Your Data Really Secure?

Malicious actors can now craft more convincing phishing attacks using Generative AI. Deepfakes are getting better. Malware adapts to avoid detection by antivirus tools. Given these developments, a strong cybersecurity strategy is arguably more important now than ever. Which is what makes the results from our latest study so puzzling.

The majority of large organizations insist that security is their top priority when it comes to managing file data infrastructure, according to our new report, The Era of Hybrid Cloud Storage. Most of these organizations feel they’re prepared for a cyberattack, too. When they did suffer an incident, however, nearly half of these enterprises either paid a ransom, struggled to recover data, or incurred costly downtime or damage to their brand.

What we learned from our research is that there is a fundamental disconnect between perception and reality when it comes to enterprise cybersecurity preparedness.

Days of downtime

The Era of Hybrid Cloud Storage is based on responses from 1,000 purchasing decision makers in the US, UK, France, and the DACH region — Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Each of these individuals is part of an organization with at least 1,000 employees. Naturally, the respondents had a great deal to say about the importance of hybrid cloud and AI. We’ll cover both topics in follow-up posts.

While the majority of organizations feel they’re prepared for a cyberattack, consider these findings:

• 45% of those that were hit experienced a severe impact such as data loss, downtime, or the need to pay ransoms
• 72% of the firms hit needed more than a week to recover
• 5 weeks was the average recovery time

Global ransomware payments declined in 2024, relative to previous years, but you don’t need to pay a ransom to suffer massive losses. Not when your operations are offline for five weeks. In some industries, this figure was even higher. On average, the manufacturing firms we surveyed needed 6.3 weeks to recover from a destructive cyberattack (keep in mind, these were not our customers). When a manufacturing plant loses access to data, this disrupts operations across the organization and brings business to a standstill.

42 days of downtime can be a grave risk to any company.

Recovery & resilience

The speed of your response time is absolutely critical after a cyberattack. The faster you can quarantine a ransomware incident, for example, the better your chances of recovering in hours or days instead of weeks. Yet a staggering 53% admit they don’t have tools in place to identify attacks in real time. Similarly, 53% confessed their data isn’t backed up, immutable, and easily recoverable. And only 39% of the organizations surveyed actually have a regularly tested plan baked into their cybersecurity strategy for when they are attacked.

On the one hand, the findings in the report are not entirely surprising. Our initial study in 2024 revealed similar results. Yet this should be unacceptable given the solutions available to enterprises today. We anticipate a major shift this year and in the years to come as the era of hybrid cloud storage takes hold.

What to demand of hybrid cloud

We’ll dive into the key hybrid cloud takeaways from the report in the next post, but the larger shift to hybrid infrastructure should come with a shift in cybersecurity readiness. An organization that manages its unstructured data with hybrid cloud storage should demand rapid recovery, rapid threat detection, and an overall level of cyber resilience that allows them to resume business as usual as soon as possible after an attack.

If the hybrid cloud storage solutions you’re evaluating do not provide that level of cyber resilience, then you should widen your search. No organization should be cut off from their data for weeks in the age of hybrid cloud.

Download our 2025 industry report, The Era of Hybrid Cloud Storage, to learn how to benchmark your cybersecurity strategy today.