Chart: Strength in Numbers

The percentage of companies with an incident-response (IR) team of 15 or more people has nearly doubled year over year, from 11% in 2020 to 21% in 2021, according to a recent Dark Reading survey of cybersecurity professionals. So has the number of IR teams with 25 or more people.

It's little wonder why: "Enterprise organizations are under tremendous pressure to bolster IT security incident detection and response capabilities because of data breaches and growing concerns over third-party risks, credential misuse, intellectual property (IP) theft, and other issues," states The State of Cybersecurity Incident Response report, which lays out the survey's results.

The good news? "The data suggests that more organizations are heeding the advice of experts to establish a formal internal team for handling response functions in the event of a breach or other security incident," according to the report.