Dean Wolson, Lenovo Infrastructure Group

For security experts, backups are often referred to as the Achilles’ heel of cyber defence. They’re the safety net an organisation relies on during a crisis, yet they’re often misconfigured or overlooked, making them a prime target for cybercriminals.

In Rubrik Zero Labs’ ‘State of Data Security in 2025: A Distributed Crisis’ report, 74% of organisations had their backup or recovery systems compromised during attacks. And in over a third of cases, these systems were rendered unusable, leaving organisations without a way to recover. A separate study by Continuity looked at 10 000 storage and backup systems in 300 enterprise environments. On average, each environment had around 10 vulnerabilities affecting its storage and data protection infrastructure, half of which were high-risk, and could be used to break in or cause serious damage.