UK firms back AI workloads but doubt cyber recovery

Wasabi’s latest UK survey found that 39% of businesses are fully confident they could recover cloud data after a cyberattack. It also found that 91% back up production AI workloads.

The results highlight a gap between AI data protection efforts and broader confidence in cyber recovery among UK organisations. Wasabi surveyed 200 UK IT decision-makers as part of a wider study of 1,700 respondents across 12 countries.

More than a third of UK organisations, 37%, reported suffering a cyberattack in the past year that resulted in loss of access to public cloud data. Meanwhile, 35% ranked disaster recovery as their top cloud data security priority.

The figures suggest businesses are placing greater emphasis on backup and recovery as AI-related data volumes grow. The survey also found that 72% back up AI test and development environments.

Recovery Gap

The research suggests many businesses now treat AI workloads as core data assets but remain less certain about their ability to restore data after an attack. That mismatch comes as ransomware continues to disrupt operations across the UK and as more companies move data and workloads into public cloud environments.

For IT leaders, recovery confidence has become a practical concern because disruption can extend beyond the initial attack. Loss of access to cloud data can affect internal systems, customer-facing services, and development work tied to AI models and datasets.

Kevin Dunn, Vice President & General Manager EMEA at Wasabi, linked the findings to the wider growth of AI use in business systems.

“Companies are racing ahead with AI, but some still can’t be sure their data would survive a cyberattack. World Backup Day is a good reminder that no matter how much you invest in AI or other technologies, it’s all meaningless if your data cannot be recovered quickly and cost effectively. Organisations should consider new immutability innovations to enhance their cyber resilience capabilities before a new breach exposes the gap,” Dunn said.

Survey Scope

The UK results are part of Wasabi’s 2026 Cloud Storage Index, which examined views on public cloud storage among IT decision-makers with at least some responsibility for purchasing in that area. The broader study covered respondents in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, and the United States.

All surveyed organisations had more than 100 employees and represented both the public and private sectors. Vanson Bourne conducted the research.

The UK findings add to a broader industry discussion about the resilience of cloud-stored information as businesses increase spending on AI tools and services. Backups for production AI workloads appear widely adopted in the sample, but the lower level of confidence in successful data recovery suggests backup policies alone may not reassure decision-makers.

Disaster recovery ranking as the leading cloud security priority also shows that organisations are thinking beyond prevention. In practice, that places greater focus on how quickly systems can be restored, whether backups are isolated from attackers, and whether data can be recovered without loss.

For companies using AI in production, those questions carry extra weight because training data, model outputs, and related operational information may be difficult or costly to recreate. The findings show that while many UK organisations are backing up that information, a significant share still doubts it could be restored cleanly after an attack.

More than a third of respondents reported an incident that caused loss of access to public cloud data, underlining the scale of that concern.