The State of Enterprise Incident Response

State of Incident Response in 2025: Key Findings from Dark Reading’s Survey

The increasing inevitability of data breaches — driven by sophisticated threats and expanding attack surfaces — has significantly reshaped incident response (IR) practices in recent years. Many organizations are shifting from prevention-centric strategies to rapid response and resilience.

Dark Reading’s 2025 Incident Response Survey queried individuals who predominantly identified themselves as a part of the C-suite, or titles like vice president, director, or manager of IT or cybersecurity from organizations of all sizes across more than 20 industry sectors. The questions covered their current incident response capabilities, the tools and processes they use in responding to material security incidents, their biggest concerns and obstacles, and plans to bolster capabilities in the coming year.

This report has shown that a high percentage of organizations last year focused a sizable portion of their security resources on bolstering their incident response capabilities. Read the entire report to learn more about the state of enterprise incident response.