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HOW PREPARED ARE YOU TO RECOVER FROM A CYBERATTACK?
Move through the Cohesity 5 Steps of Cyber Resilience© and collect points as you go.
START NOWDiscover and protect all data
Do you back up SaaS, on-prem, and cloud data from all your data sources using a single platform?
Is your backup environment managed by a small team that also handles other IT responsibilities?
Do you manage backup and recovery across multiple tools?
Can you see unprotected data across your environment at a glance?
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Ensure data is always recoverable
Are your backups immutable?
Have you hardened your platform with MFA, immutability, and RBAC?
Do you adhere to the industry best practice of 3-2-1-1 backup?
Do you require additional authorization for critical backup and recovery operations (e.g. deleting backups)?
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Detect and investigate threats
Do you check your backups for anomalies, malware, or threats?
Does your backup platform alert you accurately to potential threats?
Can your backup platform help investigate attacks and assess impact when primary systems are down?
Does your backup platform work with the tools you already use to investigate threats?
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Practice application resilience
Do you have a documented incident recovery process your team can execute under pressure?
Do you regularly test recovery for your most critical workloads and applications?
Do you have a clean room solution that helps you speed up investigation and remediation to help ensure a secure recovery?
Do you have access to expert support or services during a cyber incident?
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Optimize data risk posture
Can you identify and reduce data risk across your environment without increasing management overhead?
Does your backup platform help you identify and prioritize the most critical workloads you should be backing up?
Can you use your backup platform to classify sensitive data and assess the impact of an attack?
Do you understand what data might be in unsecured storage (e.g. S3 buckets) across cloud and SaaS environments?
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Wherever you are today, you can progress towards greater ransomware resilience tomorrow. We can help you strengthen your security posture and improve your recovery capabilities, so you can improve your score the next time around.
CONTACT SALES READ THE REPORTYour cyber resilience score and what it means
Here’s a preliminary assessment of where you stand and recommendations for increasing your resilience.
If ransomware hit today, recovery would likely be time-consuming, painful, expensive, and uncertain.
But you now have a clear starting point for strengthening your ransomware resilience. You’re likely relying on a mix of native cloud backup, manual processes, or tools that made sense when they were first deployed, but ransomware threats have evolved quickly.
Midsize businesses in this band typically use 7 or more tools. Fragmented toolsets mean less visibility, slower recovery, and more attack surface for adversaries to exploit.
Where you may be exposed
- You may have limited visibility into compromised backup data, increasing the risk of reinfection and delaying recovery.
- Your backup copies may be reachable from the same environment as production, meaning one compromised credential exposes everything.
- Your recovery process may be undocumented, manual, or untested, forcing your team to improvise under pressure and extending downtime.
- Your environment may rely on multiple backup tools, creating coverage gaps where immutable protection is missing or inconsistently applied. Data is left vulnerable to contamination, encryption, or unauthorized access.
Recommended next steps
- Implement immutable backups so protected data can’t be altered or deleted.
- Unify visibility and protection across your entire data estate with a single solution.
- Document a recovery plan your team can execute without improvising.
- Enable MFA and other built-in security controls to make unauthorized access more difficult.
How Cohesity helps
Cohesity gives you the foundation for ransomware resilience. A single backup platform for all workloads across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS provides centralized control of your entire data estate, and immutable backups enabled by default ensure your protected data can’t be contaminated by threat actors. You don’t need a large team or large budget to move from critical exposure to a defensible posture.
You’ve already taken important steps to protect your environment. Your backups are running, and your team has foundational processes in place. You’re already thinking about ransomware recovery, which is a solid start. The next opportunity is to strengthen the architecture around those investments: isolate your backup copies from your primary environment and make your recovery process more consistent and ready for a targeted ransomware attack. The gaps in this band are exactly the ones threat actors have learned to find and exploit.
Where you may be exposed
- Your immutable backups may be partially in place, but that protection may not be applied consistently across all workloads or environments.
- Your backup copies probably share the same identity perimeter as production copies, meaning they carry the same blast radius under a credential compromise.
- Your environment may lack pre-restore malware scans, so you may be unable to verify if a recovery point is clean before restoring it.
- Your recovery process is likely untested under pressure, and a real incident will surface dependency issues you haven’t accounted for.
- Your SaaS data, especially M365, is likely under-protected or relying on Microsoft’s 30-day native retention.
Recommended next steps
How Cohesity helps
Cohesity FortKnox cyber vaulting closes the blast radius gap immediately with an isolated backup copy outside your environment that no credential compromise can reach. Pair it with threat scanning before restoring to break the reinfection cycle. These two capabilities directly address the root cause of reinfection.
You have meaningful protections in place across several dimensions. This is actually one of the most common profiles we see today, and one of the most dangerous, because it can feel more secure than it is. Your backups are running, and some hardening exists. Your team has also started to think beyond operational recovery and toward stronger ransomware resilience. But gaps likely remain in consistency, coverage, or your ability to execute a fast, confident recovery when the clock is ticking.
Where you may be exposed
- Your protection likely covers primary workloads but you may have gaps from using different tools for edge environments, cloud, or SaaS.
- Your recovery may be documented, but it probably hasn’t been tested end-to-end under realistic conditions.
- Your backup data may only get partial anomaly detection, without pre-restore malware scanning.
- Your identity resilience (Active Directory protection) is likely not addressed, compromising your ability to access systems and infrastructure.
- Your use of multiple tools likely creates management overhead, making it harder to spot protection gaps or outdated settings before they create risk.
- Your safest recovery copy may share the blast radius with production unless it’s isolated in a cyber vault, making backup compromise and uncertain recovery more likely.
Recommended next steps
How Cohesity helps
A coverage map gives you instant visibility into unprotected workloads across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS, while Cohesity FortKnox adds an isolated, immutable cyber vault outside the production blast radius. Cohesity RecoveryAgent automates recovery orchestration, so your recovery is tested, repeatable, and executable by anyone on your team, not just your most experienced engineer at 2 a.m.
Your organization has made deliberate and meaningful investments in ransomware resilience. Your backups are immutable, your team has tested recovery, and you likely have multilayered protections in place. You’re in better shape than the majority of midsize businesses. The risk you need to address isn’t a fundamental gap. It’s the edges: the workloads that aren’t fully covered, the recovery process that hasn’t been tested under real pressure, and the identity infrastructure that’s one step removed from your backup strategy. Double extortion (data theft before encryption) and Active Directory attacks are the most common vectors at this maturity level.
Where you may be exposed
- You have strong coverage for primary workloads but may have gaps in newer environments, SaaS, or recently acquired systems.
- Your Active Directory resilience may need review. It’s often the most underestimated attack vector and can become the biggest barrier to quick recovery.
- Your recovery orchestration may exist but probably isn’t fully automated, meaning manual steps under pressure may introduce more risk.
- You have partial threat intelligence integration: backup scanning exists but may not use the most current threat feeds and YARA rules.
- Your reliance on multiple tools across the environment may create an opportunity to simplify management and improve consistency across protection policies.
Recommended next steps
How Cohesity helps
Identity Resilience adds AD-specific backup and recovery alongside your data protection posture. Cohesity RecoveryAgent fully automates your recovery blueprints, and Google Threat Intelligence keeps your defenses ahead of attackers, not behind them.
You’re operating at a mature level of ransomware readiness. Your backups are immutable and verified. Recovery is orchestrated and tested in an isolated environment. Your team knows what to do when an attack hits, and there’s an isolated vault copy that no attacker can reach even with full credential compromise. The focus now is maintaining that strength as your environment and the threat landscape continue to evolve. You’re in the top tier of organizations globally for ransomware preparedness.
Where you may be exposed
- Even at this level, your recovery plans still need periodic re-testing, since they tend to degrade as environments change.
- Your defenses still need continuous adaptation against new attack vectors such as AI-assisted attacks, supply chain compromise, and identity-based attacks.
- Your recovery capability may still depend on just one or two people, which remains a real risk.
- You may need to formally document your resilience posture to meet emerging regulations like DORA, NIS2, and SEC disclosure rules. Your own environment may be hardened, but gaps remain if third-party and supply chain risk go unaddressed.
Recommended next steps
How Cohesity helps
Cohesity provides proactive resilience assessments, tabletop exercises, and expert-led reviews to ensure your posture evolves with the threat landscape. Our team works with you before an incident, so your team is sharper, your plan is current, and you can report confidently to the board that your resilience posture is both real and validated.
Strengthen your ransomware resilience now
Contact our sales team for help closing your resilience gaps. And for the latest data on ransomware resilience for midsize businesses, read the report