By Colm Keegan, Senior Consultant, Dell Technologies
Organisations have spent the last decade strengthening prevention capabilities — deploying advanced firewalls, endpoint protections, identity controls, and now AI-powered threat detection. But even as security stacks grow more sophisticated, a subtle yet dangerous gap continues to widen beneath the surface.
It’s a gap between what organisations believe they can recover from and what they can actually recover from.
That gap has a cost. And like all unaddressed liabilities, it compounds over time.
It’s what we call Resilience Debt — the accumulation of operational risk created when recovery readiness does not keep pace with the growing complexity and sophistication of cyber threats.
And based on our newly expanded Dell Global Cyber Resilience Insights research, resilience debt is not only real — it’s widespread, and it’s accelerating.
The moment you feel ready is the moment resilience debt begins to grow
On paper, global organisations look confident. Nearly every participant in the survey — 99% worldwide — reports having a formal cyber resilience strategy in place. That should indicate maturity. But the data reveals a more complicated reality.
Despite their stated confidence, 63% of IT leaders believe their executives are overestimating readiness. That mismatch isn’t an abstract philosophical disagreement — it’s a leading indicator of resilience debt.
Because when leaders believe they are more prepared than they are, they stop asking the deeper operational questions:
– When was the last recovery test?
– Did we validate our backups — or just assume they’re clean?
– Have we tried restoring in a zero-trust or clean-room environment?
– Are we protecting the recovery path with the same rigor as the production path?
When these questions go unasked, resilience debt accumulates silently.
How resilience debt accumulates and why it catches organisations off guard
Here’s the core issue: recovery readiness decays unless it is actively refreshed.
Based on global results, we see several patterns that create resilience debt:
- Testing frequency declines, but risk increases
Organisations that test recovery monthly or more achieve a 55% success rate.
Those that test infrequently fall to 38%.
The longer you go without testing, the wider the resilience gap grows — quietly, predictably, and dangerously.
- Backups age into “assumed trust”
Global respondents admit that attackers increasingly target backup systems — corrupting snapshots, manipulating catalogs, and exploiting configuration drift.
Yet many organisations still treat backups as sacred and immutable, rather than as assets requiring testing and validation.
- Documentation stays static while environments change
Playbooks age. Personnel turn over. Infrastructure evolves.
But resilience plans often lag by months — sometimes years.
Every change that isn’t reflected in the recovery strategy adds to resilience debt.
- Prevention overshadows recovery preparedness
78% of global organisations invest more in preventing attacks than in preparing to recover from them.
That imbalance leaves recovery underfunded, untested, and underprioritised — even as attackers shift upstream to compromise recovery paths directly.
Prevention-only strategies don’t eliminate resilience debt; they accelerate it.
Why resilience debt is more dangerous than security debt
Security debt (unpatched vulnerabilities, outdated controls) is widely recognised. But resilience debt is more deceptive — because it remains hidden until the worst possible moment:
When the organisation actually needs to recover.
At that stage:
– It’s too late to test.
– Too late to update playbooks.
– Too late to discover corrupted backups.
– Too late to improvise new recovery workflows.
Resilience debt doesn’t announce itself gradually. It reveals itself suddenly — through extended downtime, missed RTOs and RPOs, and recovery failures that catch leaders off guard.
And our global research shows that 57% of organisations did not recover as effectively as planned during their most recent incident or drill.
That’s resilience debt coming due.
The Dell point of view: Resilience debt is preventable, but only with deliberate action
At Dell, we work with organisations across every industry, and we consistently see one pattern:
The organisations that treat recovery as a strategic capability. not an operational afterthought, dramatically outperform those that don’t.
To reverse resilience debt, mature organisations are now:
– Building isolated cyber vaults to protect critical data from ransomware and insider compromise
– Using automated validation and AI/ML-driven clean restore techniques to ensure recovery points are usable
– Running routine recovery tests that simulate real-world adversarial conditions
– Treating resilience as a board-level initiative — not simply a technical workflow
– Balancing investments evenly between cyber prevention and cyber recovery
Resilience debt is real. But it’s not irreversible.
A new mindset: Recovery as a catalyst, not a cost centre
Organisations with mature resilience programs don’t just recover better — they operate with more confidence. They innovate more freely. They embrace transformation more aggressively. They trust their infrastructure because they’ve validated it.
And that’s the ultimate promise: When resilience debt is addressed, cyber resilience becomes more than a safety measure. It becomes a competitive advantage.