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Your headquarters wrote a great security program. Your locations aren't running it.
That gap is the whole ballgame. For brands with franchised locations, a single corporate security mandate makes an attack 3x more likely to stay where it started. Only 51% enforce one across every location.
83% of security leaders at brands running hundreds or thousands of locations say they're confident in their cybersecurity posture. In the same 12 months, 86% were attacked, and 77% of those attacks spread beyond where they started, into other locations, corporate systems, and shared vendors. Confidence lives at headquarters. The breach travels through the footprint.
We call it the distributed enterprise illusion: the belief that a strong program at the center protects every location. It doesn’t. What decides how far an attack travels across your footprint isn't your technology. It's whether you mandate one standard—everywhere.
What you'll take away:
- The one move that contains the blast radius. Among attacked brands with franchised locations, those that mandate one standard everywhere are 3x more likely to keep an attack contained: it spreads in 64% of cases with a mandate, against 89% without. No single technology, not even real-time visibility, moved that number.
- Where your standard is breaking down. Only 51% mandate policy across all locations, and 80% don't fully fold a new location into central monitoring and enforcement by opening day. See the gaps most brands miss.
- The AI exposure you can't see. 63% of locations were hit by a deepfake impersonating a corporate executive in the past 12 months. Just 4% require a security review before a location adopts an AI tool.
- What your board isn't hearing. 91% admit a material incident went unreported last year, and 43% say five or more did.
Before you scale another location, know this:
47% say a breach across most of their locations would cost $11 million or more, and 22% put it at $101 million or higher. The report shows exactly where the standard breaks down across a distributed footprint, and the one move that keeps an attack from spreading.
Get the 2026 report and see how far an attack would travel across your footprint.
"You cannot monitor your way out of the blast radius. You have to govern."
- Kevin Pierce, President and Chief Operating Officer, VikingCloud
About this study
VikingCloud commissioned an online survey of 200 security and IT decision-makers at organizations with 5,000 or more employees and 500 or more locations across the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and France, conducted in July 2026. Of the 200 organizations, 130 are headquartered in the United States and 70 in Europe. We saw no meaningful differences between U.S. and European respondents.
Your headquarters wrote a great security program. Your locations aren't running it.
That gap is the whole ballgame. For brands with franchised locations, a single corporate security mandate makes an attack 3x more likely to stay where it started. Only 51% enforce one across every location.
83% of security leaders at brands running hundreds or thousands of locations say they're confident in their cybersecurity posture. In the same 12 months, 86% were attacked, and 77% of those attacks spread beyond where they started, into other locations, corporate systems, and shared vendors. Confidence lives at headquarters. The breach travels through the footprint.
We call it the distributed enterprise illusion: the belief that a strong program at the center protects every location. It doesn’t. What decides how far an attack travels across your footprint isn't your technology. It's whether you mandate one standard—everywhere.
What you'll take away:
- The one move that contains the blast radius. Among attacked brands with franchised locations, those that mandate one standard everywhere are 3x more likely to keep an attack contained: it spreads in 64% of cases with a mandate, against 89% without. No single technology, not even real-time visibility, moved that number.
- Where your standard is breaking down. Only 51% mandate policy across all locations, and 80% don't fully fold a new location into central monitoring and enforcement by opening day. See the gaps most brands miss.
- The AI exposure you can't see. 63% of locations were hit by a deepfake impersonating a corporate executive in the past 12 months. Just 4% require a security review before a location adopts an AI tool.
- What your board isn't hearing. 91% admit a material incident went unreported last year, and 43% say five or more did.
Before you scale another location, know this:
47% say a breach across most of their locations would cost $11 million or more, and 22% put it at $101 million or higher. The report shows exactly where the standard breaks down across a distributed footprint, and the one move that keeps an attack from spreading.
Get the 2026 report and see how far an attack would travel across your footprint.
"You cannot monitor your way out of the blast radius. You have to govern."
- Kevin Pierce, President and Chief Operating Officer, VikingCloud
About this study
VikingCloud commissioned an online survey of 200 security and IT decision-makers at organizations with 5,000 or more employees and 500 or more locations across the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and France, conducted in July 2026. Of the 200 organizations, 130 are headquartered in the United States and 70 in Europe. We saw no meaningful differences between U.S. and European respondents.
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