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You Backed Up Your Data, but Can You Bring It Back?You Backed Up Your Data, but Can You Bring It Back?You Backed Up Your Data, but Can You Bring It Back?

Despite investing in backup solutions, organizations struggle with complex recovery processes. Here are seven practices that strengthen backup and recovery.

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Industry Perspectives

September 1, 2025

5 Min Read

data

Alamy

By Ofer Regev, Faddom

Data loss events are becoming increasingly expensive, frequent, and challenging to recover from. While most IT teams have backup systems in place, having backups alone no longer guarantees resilience. Ransomware attacks , human error, and service interdependencies have turned the recovery process into a complex challenge. According to IBM , the average data breach cost in 2024 reached 4ドル.88 million, reflecting a 10% increase from the previous year.

In these critical moments, organizations rely heavily on their backups. However, recovery efforts often fall short. The issue is not that backups are missing; rather, the recovery process itself is flawed.

Many IT teams assume that the existence of backups guarantees successful restoration. This misconception can be costly. A recent report from Veeam revealed that 49% of companies failed to recover most of their servers after a significant incident. This highlights a painful reality: Most backup strategies focus too much on storage and not enough on service restoration.

Having backup files is not the same as successfully restoring systems. In real-world recovery scenarios, teams face unknown dependencies, a lack of orchestration, incomplete documentation, and gaps between infrastructure and applications. When services need to be restored in a specific order and under intense pressure, any oversight can become a significant bottleneck.

To build true resilience, IT leaders need more than just reliable backups. They must ensure those backups can be used quickly, accurately, and securely when it matters most.

7 Critical Practices That Strengthen Backup and Recovery

These seven practices, derived from real-world experience and identified operational gaps, form the foundation of a modern, recovery-ready strategy. Each practice is designed to bridge the gap between data protection and service restoration.

1. Conduct Regular Recovery Testing

Backups are only as valuable as your ability to restore from them. Routine recovery testing is the most effective way to ensure your strategy is functional. Simulate full-scale outages, rather than just file-level restores, and involve all relevant teams across IT, security, and business functions.

These exercises can uncover technical gaps, hidden dependencies, and process delays that might not be visible in standard reports. Additionally, they provide your team with critical hands-on experience, reducing stress and confusion during a real incident.

2. Adopt a Hybrid Backup Strategy

Relying on a single backup location creates a single point of failure. Local backups can be fast but are vulnerable to physical threats, hardware failures, or ransomware attacks. Cloud backups offer flexibility and off-site protection but may suffer bandwidth constraints, cost limitations, or provider outages.

A hybrid backup strategy ensures multiple recovery paths by combining on-premises storage, cloud solutions, and optionally offline or air-gapped options. This approach allows teams to choose the fastest or most reliable method based on the nature of the disruption.

3. Leverage Application Dependency Mapping

Most business services depend on a web of interconnected components rather than a single server. These components include authentication systems, DNS, databases, cloud integrations, and more. If recovery efforts begin without understanding these relationships, teams may restore nonfunctional parts that cannot operate without upstream services.

Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) solutions provide a real-time view of how systems communicate, enabling teams to prioritize recovery steps in the correct order. ADM tools passively monitor traffic to identify dependencies, reducing the risk of delays due to overlooked components.

4. Implement Immutable Backups

Backups are prime targets during ransomware attacks. If cybercriminals can alter, encrypt, or delete your backup files, they eliminate your last chance for recovery.

Immutable backups protect data from tampering by enforcing write-once, read-many policies that cannot be overridden. This feature makes it impossible for attackers to erase or modify backup content during a specified retention period. Immutable storage adds a layer of defense and supports compliance by preserving the integrity of historical data.

5. Document and Automate Recovery Playbooks

High-pressure incidents are not the time to improvise. Recovery playbooks give your team clear, step-by-step instructions outlining what needs to be done, by whom, and in what sequence. These playbooks should include technical and operational workflows and account for multiple failure scenarios.

Automation enhances speed and consistency; tasks such as system reboots, load balancing, network routing, or service health checks can be scripted in advance. Storing these playbooks offline ensures accessibility even when the core infrastructure is unavailable.

6. Perform Regular Backup Health Checks and Validation

Backups often fail silently. A successful job report does not guarantee that the data is usable or complete. Silent failures can lead to significant recovery delays, whether due to corrupted files, failed replication, or misconfigured policies.

Health checks should encompass checksum comparisons, full test restores in sandbox environments, and continuous monitoring of job logs and capacity limits. Regular validation ensures that your backups do more than exist; they actually function when needed.

7. Secure Backup Access and Credentials

Attackers find backup systems attractive targets. They can disable retention policies, delete snapshots, or compromise recovery options if they gain access.

To mitigate this risk, access to backup systems with strict role-based controls and multi-factor authentication should be restricted. Backup credentials should be kept separate from other administrative domains. Always treat the infrastructure that supports your backups as mission-critical rather than secondary.

From Backup to Recovery: The Real Measure of Resilience

Storing data is simple, but restoring business operations is much more challenging. Backups alone do not guarantee continuity, especially when teams need to recover quickly, under pressure, and without complete visibility into system dependencies.

True resilience lies in the ability to recover systems, services, and business operations in the correct order, with clarity, speed, and confidence. This requires more than just backup files and instead demands recovery plans that are thoroughly tested, adequately documented, fully automated, securely protected, and aligned with how systems actually operate in practice.

Backup strategies must evolve into comprehensive recovery strategies. Creating a backup is not the final step; rather, it is the beginning of a much more complex process that only proves its worth when a recovery is needed.

About the author:

Ofer Regevhas 18 years of experience in the IT industry. He currently serves as CTO and head of network operations for Faddom (formerly VNT), a startup that raised 12ドル million to help companies map IT infrastructure wherever it lives. Faddom is used to map and monitor over 1 million application instances at organizations like Coca-Cola, NetApp, and UCLA. He previously served in the IDF's elite computing and information services unit, Mamram.