Backup has always been viewed as a form of insurance. Something you hope you never need, but which silently marks “success” in the background. This is no longer the case. The industry is moving toward the question of whether your organization is able to provide key services even in a crisis situation.

Backup remains the foundation layer. Without proper backup, there is no resilience, no recovery, no real cyber defense. But that is not enough. We need a larger, more integrated approach to resilience as a whole. The cybersecurity trends 2026 described in this article highlight this shift.

1. AI Makes Attacks Faster and Easier

Attackers now use AI to accelerate everything that used to slow them down. They generate and personalize phishing content on demand. Automation helps them map cloud accounts, exposed services, and misconfigurations. Ransomware affiliates plug into playbooks that run in minutes.

A 2025 Palo Alto Networks report highlights this acceleration, while DeliaQuest’s Annual Cyber Threat Report shows that the average breakout time has shrunk from 48 minutes in 2024 to about 18 minutes in 2025.

From the perspective of backup and disaster recovery, this sounds brutal. Around 76% of organizations say they struggle to match the speed and sophistication of AI-powered attacks.

The implication is clear. Backup still matters, but how you design and protect it matters more than ever. You need a mix of controls at the backup layer: isolated storage, strong separation of credentials, integrity checks, and automated response around backup infrastructure. If your protection architecture assumes hours to react, you are planning for a world that no longer exists.

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Especially in Europe, regulations around data protection and operational resilience increasingly affect backup and disaster recovery. NIS2 is now in effect at the EU level (with national implementations). DORA has applied since January 2025. The EU Cyber Resilience Act adds reporting obligations from September 2026 (with broader obligations from December 2027).

All of this points in the same direction. Know where your data is. Be able to prove that you can recover it. Demonstrate that your controls, including backup, are secure by design and by default.

This affects the backup teams on multiple fronts at once. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans must now prioritize the recovery of essential operations. Teams need reliable reporting playbooks. They have to run tests and audits that identify vulnerabilities before attackers do. And don’t forget technical data protection measures like encryption, access control, and multi-factor authentication.

A practical test is answering the following question: What evidence could you show if a regulator asked you to prove that your organization could restore its most critical services after an attack?

Read also: NIS2 in Practice: All You Need to Know

3. Hybrid and Multi Cloud Environments Require a Single Protection Strategy

Most organizations now rely on a hybrid stack that combines on-prem systems, multiple public clouds, private clouds, SaaS, and sometimes edge or Operational Technology (OT) environments. The challenge is that backup has often followed technology, not business risk.

Teams are left with one backup product for VMware, another for Microsoft 365, native snapshots in each cloud, some scripts for databases, and perhaps nothing at all for edge and SaaS side projects. They use mixed policies and rely on ad hoc retention. Nobody can answer the question, “Show me all the recovery options for this business service across every environment”.

On the one hand, attackers look for the weakest link, the unprotected cluster, or the SaaS app that protects only against accidential deletion of data. On the other hand, auditors point to blind spots and retention policies that violate your organization’s own rules.

In 2026, the winning pattern is a combined protection strategy. And we are not talking about a single supplier in every place. It calls for one source of truth for inventory, classification, retention, and reporting. Backups should be treated as part of a single resilience structure covering physical, virtual, cloud, and SaaS applications.

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4. SaaS and AI Sprawl Create Dangerous Data Protection Blind Spots

Shadow IT used to mean a few rogue SaaS apps. With shadow AI, the problem has multiplied. Business units and individual users subscribe to services which store documents, code, prompts, logs, and customer data far outside official systems. Sometimes this happens before IT or security can react. 

Research shows how large the problem is. In a 2024 Next DLP poll, 73% of cybersecurity professionals admitted to using unauthorized apps, including AI, and organizations that dealt with shadow IT reported data loss in 65% of cases. The 2025 SaaS Security Risks Report​ revealed that 85% of SaaS apps were unmanaged. IBM’s Cost of Data Breach Report 2024 found that 35% of breaches involved shadow data.

From a data protection point of view, this is a red flag. You cannot protect what you do not know exists. You also cannot pretend that everything important lives only in systems IT selected years ago.

The solution is governance. Bring SaaS access under SSO where possible. Use SaaS discovery controls (for example, CASB) to determine what services are actually in use and where data flows. Then  establish owners and rules for access, retention, and response. Follow the “never trust, always verify” principle and use the ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) framework.

5. Cyberattacks Now Target the Recovery Flow Itself

Ransomware has evolved beyond mere encryption. Data theft, multi-stage extortion, and extended dwell times are now part of the business day. As early as 2021, it was estimated that about 83% of ransomware attacks included data exfiltration as part of “double extortion” attacks. In a 2022 Venafi survey, 72% of IT decision-makers agreed ransomware was evolving faster than the security controls needed to defend against it.

Attackers have also started targeting broadly defined data recovery infrastructure directly, such as hypervisors, storage controllers, backup servers, orchestration pipelines, and management interfaces. In OT and IoT environments, they may also impact devices that support physical operations, safety mechanisms, and core business processes. Microsoft reported that more than 90% of ransomware attacks came from unmanaged devices.

Your tools, storage, and runbooks are no longer outside the blast radius. They are now inside it.

Designing resilient backups now involves elements such as isolated management planes, immutable storage, segmented replication paths, and independent monitoring.

If you design as if the attackers will try to break your recovery path, the architecture will look significantly different. You are still investing in backup, but in backup that is resilient enough to survive contact with a real adversary.

Read more:

Resilience in Times of Machine-Speed Threats

In 2026, backup and disaster recovery teams will play a key role in ensuring cyber resilience. Not because they own all the security tools, but because they stand on the last line of defense. When all else fails, they decide whether the organization can recover without losing its business.

AI fuels attacks and regulators require provable data recovery, not vague promises. Hybrid clouds make management increasingly complex. Backup systems themselves have become targets. SaaS and AI spread critical data across locations that are hard to track and even harder to restore.

None of this diminishes the importance of backups. It shows the shortcomings of conventional, isolated, copy-focused strategies. Organizations that protect themselves treat backup as a fundamental element of a broader resilience strategy. They use properly secured backups alongside data recovery orchestration, regular tests, and validate their ability to restore data.

Those who act now will look back at the next crisis as a tough day at the office, not a breaking point.

 

 

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