New report finds that 74% of IT leaders believe that integrating AI into their businesses could increase vulnerability, but only 16% rely on cyber recovery providers for expertise
Sydney, Australia – October 7, 2025 (BUSINESS WIRE) — 11:11 Systems (“11:11”), a leading managed infrastructure provider, today announced its latest research findings. A new global study of over 800 senior IT leaders reveals that complexity, overconfidence, and lack of expertise are leaving businesses dangerously exposed to cyber threats.
The survey, conducted across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, showed that in APAC, 84% of IT leaders believe their organisations are overconfident in their cyber incident recovery capabilities, despite facing mounting challenges. Highlighting the scale of these challenges, the research found 88% of Australian respondents have experienced at least one cyberattack in the last 12 months, of which 63% endured two or more cyberattacks in the past year. Worse yet, 75% of respondents are concerned that integrating AI into their businesses could increase their vulnerability to cyber attacks.
Overwhelmed by planning complexity: 48% of Australian respondents cited planning complexity as their top concern, compared to 45% reported by total respondents in the survey including Europe and North America.
Staggering financial losses: There were significant financial losses reported by Australians from just one hour of cyber-related downtime.
- 73% reported losses of up to US$500K
- 16% reported loss between US$501K–$1M
- 11% reported losses that exceeded US$1M
With 61% of respondents stating that recovery times following a cyber incident take between a week or two, this figure quickly adds up, costing affected organisations millions in downtime, business disruption along with legal fees and fines.
Cyber recovery providers are an untapped resource: Despite these costs and risks associated with cyber breaches and even minor incidents, only 14% of Australian businesses have fully leveraged the expertise of cyber recovery providers. Almost half (49%) prefer a hybrid approach, while 30% manage recovery in-house and 7% lack any formal plan altogether.
Cyber recovery preparedness: When asked how to improve their cyber recovery preparedness, responses varied, with 19% calling for better staff training and awareness, while 27% of respondents cited better integration of cyber resiliency and disaster recovery planning followed by greater investment in cyber incident recovery solutions. Almost one fifth (19%) said more frequent testing and simulations would improve preparedness, while 17% of respondents cited increased automation in recovery processes.
Customisation of recovery solutions remains an important consideration: 78% of Australian respondents identified application-level recovery solution customisation as extremely important, while another 16% considered it somewhat important.
Budget intentions: Encouragingly, 93% of Australian respondents plan to invest in cyber incident recovery within the next 12 months.
Regional comparisons:
Although only 21% APAC respondents had experienced a major incident compared to North America (31%) and EMEA (23%), a significant 19% of APAC respondents had experienced cyber-attacks multiple times in the past year compared to Europe (14%) and the North America (6%).
AI driven phishing attacks are a major concern for companies for all respondents overall, with reported concerns slightly less in Australia at 38% compared to global concerns at 46%. Yet, social engineering attacks were at the highest for APAC respondents, where 28% had experienced such an AI-driven attack while Europe had the lowest incident rate at 16%. Autonomous and mutating malware attacks were the lowest in APAC compared to other regions, at only 31%.
Despite this, 84% of APAC respondents were overly confident or somewhat overconfident in their cyber incident recovery capabilities. They also have the lowest rate of respondents stating that they were realistic about their capabilities (16%).
Marc Beder, General Manager at 11:11 Systems, APAC, states: “Recent cyber incidents with companies such as Clutch Industries and Baxter Laboratories demonstrate the need for strong cybersecurity in protecting manufacturing supply chains. Even an hour of downtime can cause a significant disruption to the business and can lead to significant costs, leading to considerable stress for all parties involved, making the ability to recover rapidly and consistently essential. It’s critical to regularly evaluate your business’ cyber resilience and confirm the adequacy of current plans and systems. Given that so many of our survey’s respondents demonstrate a notable lack of preparedness, it highlights how vulnerable the industry is to cyber attacks, and this requires immediate attention.”
About the Report
The 2025 Cyber Resilience Report from 11:11 Systems gathered insights from 800+ senior IT, security and risk leaders in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, representing companies with at least 1,000 employees.
The data reflects the alarming complexities of cyber recovery planning, growing concern around AI, rising costs of downtime and the pressing need for organisations to modernise their cyber recovery strategies. The full 11:11 2025 Global Cybersecurity report is available now for download here. For more information on 11:11 Systems, visit https://1111systems.com/
About 11:11 Systems
11:11 Systems is a managed infrastructure solutions provider that empowers customers to modernise, protect, and manage mission-critical applications and data, leveraging 11:11’s resilient cloud platform. Learn more at 11:11 Systems.
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