Most businesses implement some form of backup solution to protect their IT environment and data. They may go with an on-premises approach by building a dedicated backup infrastructure in their data center. Many companies leverage cloud backup solutions that eliminate the capital expenditures associated with an on-premises strategy.
Whichever method a company adopts, running the backups is only the first step in protecting its data and environment. Teams must verify that they run successfully and ensure that the backups cover any new systems and data resources added to the infrastructure. They may need to adjust backup schedules to capture data at the appropriate frequency to meet recovery point objectives (RPOs). These activities all fall under the rubric of managing the backup solution.
Backup management is essential for protecting systems and data. But the ability to recover systems and information from the backups is the most important aspect of a backup solution. Teams must be able to recover backed-up data effectively and efficiently to address a wide range of data loss or unavailability scenarios.
Organizations must test their recovery processes to verify that the backup solution protects their business. Let’s look at the importance of backup testing and the cost of ignoring this crucial IT activity.
Why Don’t You Test Your Backups?
Your company might not be testing its backup recovery procedures for any of the following reasons.
- We don’t have the time: Teams often face pressing IT issues, such as troubleshooting problems, integrating new software, or addressing customer demands. They may relegate backup testing to the back burner and get to it only if they have nothing else to do.
- We lack the expertise: Small businesses often lack the IT skills necessary to run recovery tests and may just hope they never need to use them.
- Reporting looks good: Backup reporting may indicate that the scheduled backups are completing successfully. This reporting can introduce a false sense of security, as the backups may not be usable for recovery.
- We trust the vendor: A company may feel it is working with a trusted backup product from an industry-leading vendor. A trust-but-verify attitude is essential, no matter how trustworthy a vendor’s solution may seem.
- We tested them before: The question here is how long ago recovery procedures were tested. Modern businesses typically have dynamic IT environments that can significantly change recovery processes.
All of the above reasons are, in reality, poor excuses for failing to address a crucial aspect of protecting your business. If teams cannot perform successful recoveries, your business is at risk in multiple situations.
What Can Happen if You Don’t Test Your Backups?
Companies that fail to test their backups expose themselves to the following unnecessary, disruptive, and potentially expensive outcomes.
Extended downtime
Businesses can face downtime of mission-critical systems due to cyberattacks or human error. Downtime is expensive because operations are disrupted, employee productivity drops, and customer service is delayed, all of which lead to lost revenue. Excessive downtime may also result in contractual penalties and service level agreement (SLA) violations.
Failed ransomware recovery
Threat actors commonly target backup systems directly during sophisticated ransomware attacks. Teams may discover that untested backup recoveries are inadequate or unusable for several reasons.
- The attack may have encrypted the backups as well as primary systems.
- Companies have not configured backups correctly to enable sequential recovery of critical systems.
- Teams may not have misconfigured immutable storage solutions or be unable to access recovery credentials.
- Restore times may be too slow to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs), impacting business continuity plans.
Silent backup data corruption
Backups can be gradually corrupted, remaining undetected until they are tested or needed for recovery. Issues that can quietly plague a backup solution include storage failures, incomplete replication, malware, human error, and software bugs. It can be devastating for teams to uncover these issues under the pressure of recovering business-critical systems.
Unachievable RTOs and RPOs
Organizations cannot verify defined RTOs and RPOs without adequate recovery testing. Their objectives become meaningless, resulting in unrealistic performance. Companies typically base disaster recovery and business continuity plans around these objectives, putting the business at risk if they cannot be met under real recovery conditions.
Regulatory compliance violations
Companies processing regulated data must have recovery capabilities that meet the data availability standards of the applicable framework. For instance, HIPAA compliance requires data to be available promptly following a cyberattack or outage. Businesses that fail to comply with this regulation expose themselves to financial, legal, and reputational damage.
When Should You Test Your Backups?
Once a company realizes the importance of backup testing, the question becomes, when and how should we perform this vital activity? This consequential question has several answers, all of which should be adopted to fully protect your IT environment, support disaster recovery, and contribute to effective business continuity plans.
- Teams should schedule periodic recovery tests of all business-critical systems and infrastructure components. Many of these recoveries can be performed on a system-by-system basis to ensure that backups are working as expected. Ideally, teams should conduct a comprehensive test that recovers the entire production environment annually.
- Backups should be tested whenever substantial changes are made to the environment or new system dependencies are introduced due to evolving business requirements.
- Teams must test their recovery capabilities to maintain compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and PCI DSS.
- Decision-makers should randomly request system recoveries to prepare for the unpredictability of modern IT environments.
How VAST’s Solutions Support Effective Backup Testing
VAST offers several backup and recovery solutions that streamline backup testing and make it easy to prepare to restore your valuable data in the event of a cyberattack or data loss. Our Cloud Backup-as-a-Service (CBaaS) offering is a managed solution that provides fast, effective recovery for systems and data. The service creates immutable backups that threat actors cannot corrupt, minimizing the damage from ransomware attacks.`
We offer Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, which provides teams with a unified process to test, recover, and fail back a wide range of applications without specialized skill sets. Companies have no excuse for not testing their backups with these effective backup and recovery solutions.
Get in touch with our backup/recovery experts today and learn how we can help you eliminate the costs of not testing your backups.
