Colm Keegan, Senior Consultant, Dell Technologies, suugests that ‘resilience debt’ is more dangerous than ‘security debt’.
Organisations have spent the last decade strengthening prevention capabilities โ 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. Itโs 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.
Itโs what we call Resilience Debt โ the accumulation of operational risk created when recovery readiness does not keep pace with the growing complexity and sophistication of cyber threats.ย And based on our newly expanded Dell Global Cyber Resilience Insights research, resilience debt is not only real โ itโs widespread, and itโs accelerating.
On paper, global organisations look confident. Nearly every participant in the survey โ 99 per cent worldwide โ 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, 63pc of IT leaders believe their executives are overestimating readiness. That mismatch isnโt an abstract philosophical disagreement โ itโs 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 โ or just assume theyโre 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. Hereโs 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 55pc success rate. Those that test infrequently fall to 38pc. The longer you go without testing, the wider the resilience gap grows โ quietly, predictably, and dangerously.
- Backups age into โassumed trustโ
Global respondents admit that attackers increasingly target backup systems โ corrupting snapshots, manipulating catalogues, 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 โ sometimes years. Every change that isnโt reflected in the recovery strategy adds to resilience debt.
- Prevention overshadows recovery preparedness
78pc of global organisations invest more in preventing attacks than in preparing to recover from them. That imbalance leaves recovery underfunded, untested, and underprioritised โ even as attackers shift upstream to compromise recovery paths directly.
Prevention-only strategies donโt eliminate resilience debt; they accelerate it. Security debt (unpatched vulnerabilities, outdated controls) is widely recognised. But resilience debt is more deceptive โ because it remains hidden until the worst possible moment: When the organisation actually needs to recover. At that stage:
- Itโs too late to test.
- Too late to update playbooks.
- Too late to discover corrupted backups.
- Too late to improvise new recovery workflows.
Resilience debt doesnโt announce itself gradually. It reveals itself suddenly โ through extended downtime, missed RTOs and RPOs, and recovery failures that catch leaders off guard.ย And our global research shows that 57 per cent of organisations did not recover as effectively as planned during their most recent incident or drill. Thatโs resilience debt coming due.
Visit the Cyber Resilience Insights page for the full report.
