Cyber resilience emerges as a distinct investment category as downtime costs hit $19M per hour
Cyber resilience is no longer considered a mere technical concern, but a board-level business imperative and a direct investment category. In terms of recovery speed, the organizations that treat it as such will bounce back faster when disruption hits.
That evolution is well underway, according to Christy Wyatt (pictured), president and chief executive officer at Absolute Security. New research published by the company at Black Hat 2026 found that the average cost of one hour of endpoint downtime across 1,000 CISOs surveyed is $19 million. However, despite growing awareness of the problem, only 4% of those same practitioners said they felt genuinely ready to recover from a major disruption.
“I think the first is the cost of one hour of downtime. If we took across the — we had 1,000 CISOs participate in the survey — $19 million an hour. That’s a crazy number,” Wyatt said. “$19 million an hour is what the average was across that community. If we want to talk about how do we minimize downtime, we can put a dollar amount on it.”
Wyatt spoke with Krista Case at Black Hat USA during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how cyber resilience is emerging as a distinct market category, why the CISO’s role is expanding to encompass recovery in addition to prevention and what separates organizations that recover quickly from those that don’t. (* Disclosure below.)
