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Security threats such as ransomware remain the most common cause of outages, and recovery remains burdensome: Nearly three-quarters of respondents to a study conducted by 451 Research by S&P Global still require moderate or significant effort to restore systems after a failure. Hybrid cloud continues to lead data protection deployments, and Microsoft 365 Copilot has emerged as the top software-as-a-service platform considered for backup. The mean cost of outages came in at $1.25 million in 2026, and outages continue to carry significant productivity and reputational consequences. The study was fielded from March through April 2026.
The Take
Security threats such as ransomware remain the most common cause of outages. Despite some improvement in outage costs, organizations continue to invest in hybrid cloud and cloud-based services such as online backup and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to improve workload resiliency. The share of respondents reporting significant effort to restore primary systems after a failback dropped to 25%, though 50% still report that recoveries require moderate effort. Increased automation and more frequent disaster recovery testing will be essential to reducing the recovery burden. In the SaaS space, the share of organizations relying on their cloud vendor for SaaS data protection has dropped to 41%. Third-party backup offerings for SaaS are gaining traction, with a quarter of respondents using these tools, and the percentage could rise further if organizations become wary of relying too heavily on a single vendor.
Summary of findings
Outages remain costly and have significant real-world consequences. The mean cost of the most recent outage came in at $1.25 million in 2026, down from $2.05 million in 2025 and $2.33 million in 2024.
While the trend is encouraging, outages continue to have significant consequences: Lost worker productivity is cited by 31% of respondents who experienced an outage, followed by lost data (30%), lost revenue from missed business opportunities (22%), damaged reputation (14%) and lost customer loyalty (13%).
Security issues remain the leading cause of outages. In the 2026 study, security incidents such as ransomware and viruses are the leading cause of outages for 22% of respondents, just ahead of network failures (21%) and software failures (19%). Cloud or SaaS failures are the top cause for 17% of respondents, highlighting the need for comprehensive data protection that functions across distributed, hybrid and multicloud environments. Practitioners are acutely aware of the exposure, and they often layer immutable and off-site backups as a last line of defense against ransomware and financial fraud.
Hybrid cloud data protection extends its lead. Hybrid cloud deployments remain the most popular choice for data protection at 41% of respondents in 2026, up from 37% in 2025. Fully cloud-based services, such as online backup and DRaaS, are preferred by 34%, while solely on-premises deployment has declined to 26%, compared with 30% in 2025, 25% in 2024 and 34% in 2023. The on-premises share continues to oscillate as organizations weigh cloud costs, egress fees and data sovereignty requirements against the flexibility of hybrid approaches.
Recovery efforts have improved but remain a challenge for most organizations. Some 25% of respondents say it takes significant effort to synchronize and restore primary systems in 2026, a meaningful improvement from 35% in 2025 and 27% in 2024. An additional 50% say it takes moderate effort. Still, 10% of respondents say they never test their disaster recovery or do not have a disaster recovery plan, underscoring the need for continued investment in disaster recovery orchestration, automation and testing frequency to lock in and extend the gains observed this year.
Microsoft 365 Copilot tops SaaS backup considerations as vendor reliance moderates. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the top SaaS platform organizations would consider purchasing backup services for, cited by 57% of respondents, followed by Google Workspace (46%) and Salesforce (41%).
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