Many companies do things in a way where miracles aren't required - but the values perceived by those departments still don't seem in line with value delivered.

And after such an attack, you decide lowest cost is the primary IT driver?

Not that they need to achieve high mastery over it but a little understanding goes a long way.

I've seen it time and time again, since they don't get it they fear it and the seeming power it has over their company. They treat it like a force of nature -- something that just is instead of another business domain to learn something about and so when things break there is this weird abdication of self determination like there was no possible way to have prevented things from going down or reaching a point of no recovery.

This all in turn leads to the lower valuation of tech instead of say sales or marketing.

They hired a British company to oversee the recovery from a disaster?

I am pretty certain this is a typical post-Brexit piece about the EU not needing these British companies.

Also Maidenhead is a corporate paradise, not some village in the middle of nowhere afraid of loosing jobs.

"Those teams rebuilt around 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs and other devices" over 10 days (according to another article), while the company "ground to a halt".

I don't know about you, but if I had a team that pulled that out, I would have a deep respect for their service and contribution to the business.

Maybe I am missing something, but I didn't see anywhere where this was a company brought in, I am under the impression it is the company's internal staff recovering from ransomware, and now being laid off.

My broad (20 years) experience is that IT is usually later than forecast and often the 'business' make up the shortfall by producing miracles/take the pain.