Backup & Recovery Design

Overview

Backup is one of the most widely misunderstood areas of IT risk. Most organizations believe they have a backup solution. Far fewer have actually verified that their backups are complete, current, and recoverable within a timeframe that the business can tolerate. The gap between having a backup tool and having a validated recovery capability is where organizations discover, usually during an incident, that their protection was more assumed than real.

The consequences of inadequate backup are severe and well-documented. Ransomware incidents that should be a recovery exercise become existential threats when backups are incomplete or compromised. Hardware failures that should cause hours of disruption cause weeks of it when restore procedures haven't been tested. Data loss events that should be recoverable aren't, because retention policies didn't cover the affected systems or timeframes.

A properly designed backup and recovery capability is defined by its recovery outcomes, not its backup inputs. The questions that matter are: how long does recovery actually take, what is the maximum data loss the organization can sustain, are all critical systems covered, are backups stored in a way that a ransomware attack can't reach them, and has a restore been tested recently enough to be trusted? Organizations that can answer those questions with confidence have a real recovery capability. Those that can't are operating on hope. Hope is not a continuity plan.