Ransomware Recovery Delays Are Becoming a Major Enterprise Continuity Risk

The findings illustrate how ransomware discussions inside executive teams are increasingly tied to continuity, employee productivity, customer experience, and service availability instead of focusing only on encrypted data. As outages become harder to contain across cloud-heavy and hybrid environments, many organizations are also reviewing how internal support and IT coordination function during high-pressure incidents. That growing emphasis on connected employee service experiences is driving interest in platforms such as Zendesk, where organizations, including GitHub, Calendly, and DuPage County, have focused on simplifying IT support, reducing platform sprawl, and improving internal response efficiency across distributed teams. Enterprise leaders exploring service modernization strategies are increasingly reviewing Zendesk’s employee service guide to see how AI-enabled support environments can improve responsiveness without adding unnecessary complexity.

The report includes responses from 750 enterprise Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) across the United States and the United Kingdom and was conducted by independent polling provider Censuswide.

“It’s not surprising to learn that despite regulatory pressure, security and risk leaders remain open to paying a ransom to recover their systems and protect data, especially when considering that prolonged downtime can lead to unsustainable losses,” said Christy Wyatt, President and CEO of Absolute Security.

Wyatt said organizations that restore systems quickly are generally in a far better position to avoid extended disruption during ransomware events.

Confidence Levels Do Not Always Match Recovery Timelines

One of the more revealing findings in the report involved the difference between how prepared organizations feel and how long recovery actually takes after an incident occurs.

Many Organizations Still Need Days to Resume Normal Operations

Although 83% of surveyed CISOs said they were confident in their organization’s ability to recover from ransomware incidents, the recovery windows shared in the report were considerably longer than many executives might expect.

According to the findings, 57% of organizations required as much as six days to fully recover after an attack, while another 20% reported restoration periods lasting up to two weeks.

Not a single respondent said their organization could recover completely within one day.

The results suggest that restoring business systems after ransomware incidents remains slower and more complicated than many organizations anticipate, even after years of security investments and modernization efforts.

For companies that rely heavily on cloud applications, digital customer services, hybrid work models, and continuously connected systems, every additional hour of downtime can create mounting financial strain and customer frustration.

Many Security Teams Still Depend on Physical Access to Devices

The report also highlighted how endpoint recovery continues to create practical difficulties during ransomware remediation efforts.

Remote Restoration Gaps Continue to Slow Recovery Efforts

According to the survey, 59% of organizations said they still need to physically retrieve affected devices before remediation and restoration work can begin.

Slightly more than half of respondents said they currently have remote recovery technologies capable of restoring compromised systems without requiring hands-on access.

That creates additional complications for organizations managing large numbers of remote employees, traveling staff, and geographically distributed devices.

Absolute Security also referenced telemetry from millions of PCs showing that important endpoint security controls fail to function roughly 20% of the time, creating additional exposure across enterprise environments.

During the past 12 to 18 months, 57% of surveyed organizations reported ransomware activity connected to remote, mobile, or hybrid devices. Another 58% said incidents had rendered endpoints temporarily unusable during recovery periods.

Legacy Infrastructure Continues to Complicate Mitigation Efforts

The report also examined the growing pressure organizations face while trying to manage vulnerabilities and maintain patch coverage across mixed infrastructure environments.

Security Teams Find It Difficult to Keep Up with Growing Exposure

Employee awareness training was identified as the most difficult ransomware mitigation difficulty by respondents, with 43%, followed by legacy system patching (42%).

The report referenced Claude Mythos’ research showing how advanced language models are enabling both attackers and defenders to identify vulnerabilities at increasingly faster speeds.

For many organizations, the challenge is not simply identifying weaknesses. The harder problem is determining how quickly systems can be patched, isolated, stabilized, or restored before attackers take advantage of them.

That pressure is causing many enterprises to spend more time strengthening backup processes, restoration planning, endpoint recovery procedures, and incident coordination efforts alongside traditional preventive security measures.

The findings also show that ransomware readiness is becoming more closely tied to recovery planning and continuity preparedness than to perimeter defense alone.

Recovery Planning Gains More Attention Inside Security Programs

The report reflects how enterprise cybersecurity planning continues to evolve as ransomware incidents become more disruptive and costly.

Many organizations now operate with the understanding that preventive controls may reduce risk but cannot guarantee that attackers will never gain access. Because of that reality, restoration speed and continuity planning are receiving far greater attention during security discussions at both the executive and board levels.

For many CISOs, the conversation is gradually shifting away from the expectation of stopping every intrusion attempt and toward minimizing disruption when incidents occur.

As ransomware groups continue experimenting with AI-assisted reconnaissance, automated vulnerability discovery, and faster intrusion techniques, organizations are placing renewed emphasis on shortening recovery timelines, improving endpoint resilience, and keeping critical business services available during security incidents.

Research and Intelligence Sources: Absolute Security

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