Organizations have spent years and billions of dollars hardening their defenses against cyberattacks, but prevention alone no longer settles the question that matters most to a board. Accenture’s State of Cybersecurity Resilience 2025 report stated that organizations had faced an average of 1,876 cyberattacks in a single quarter, a 75% increase over the prior year. What’s more, 63% of the surveyed executives cited a rapidly evolving threat landscape as their biggest challenge. In such a dangerous environment, organizations must assume that eventually an attack will succeed, so IT has to be able to prove that it can recover cleanly once an attacker gets in.
Attackers already understand this shift. Mandiant, a Google subsidiary, reported in its M-Trends 2026 Report that “adversaries are systematically targeting infrastructure such as backups, identity services, and virtualization layers to deny recovery, putting immense pressure on organizations to pay ransom demands or risk losing the ability to recover.” Backup systems have become a primary target.
Demonstrating recoverability has been difficult for IT, because backup, recovery, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery all evolved as separate disciplines, with each solving its own piece of the problem essentially independently. That fragmentation leaves organizations unable to answer basic questions about their own ability to bounce back.
A new discipline, resilience operations (ResOps) has emerged to close the gap between performing backups and proving that an organization can actually use them to recover. ResOps functions as an operating discipline that focuses business, security, and infrastructure teams on recovering critical functions quickly while avoiding reinfection. This discipline also provides the teams with a common framework so they can pivot away from assumptions and anecdotes to instead quantify resilience in a repeatable, sustainable way. Spot-testing of discrete systems is not enough. Organizations need to perform regular tests of the entire system if it is to pivot away from assumptions and anecdotes to quantify resilience in a repeatable, sustainable way.
Additionally, to measure the effectiveness of recovery, the industry needs an updated resilience metric, mean time to clean recovery (MTCR). Metrics such as recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) still matter, but neither confirms that restored data is free of compromise. MTCR closes that gap, by measuring how long it takes to validate that a recovered system is both online and clean, giving CIOs, CISOs, and boards a single evidence-based answer during an attack.
Building that kind of resilience starts with architecture. Depending on a single vendor or platform across multiple heterogeneous environments introduces a single point of failure. Diversity is a strength, especially when it comes to the identity infrastructure. Recovery systems that share the same identity layer with production will fail if the identity systems are compromised, so more and more organizations now stand up an independent identity infrastructure solely for recovery. Immutable air-gapped storage rounds out the picture, but it remains rare among organizations, even for their most critical workloads. Finally, during recovery execution, backups should be paired with clean room validation of workloads before anything returns to production.
“For years the industry measured resilience by how fast we could restore data,” says Bill O’Connell, chief security officer at Commvault. “Now the measure that matters is whether we can prove, with evidence, that what we restored is actually clean.”
Vendors such as Commvault are building the infrastructure to support this shift, giving organizations the tools for testing recovery as a complete system rather than a collection of individual failure scenarios and to walk into the boardroom with proof instead of assumptions. But whatever the underlying backup-and-recovery infrastructure in this increasingly dangerous threat environment, organizations need to make attaining clean recovery their goal.
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