Rethink Your Backup and Recovery Plan Strategy

Managing backups and recovery is increasingly challenging for overwhelmed IT teams juggling other priorities. Many teams still confuse "backup" with disaster preparedness. However, true resilience involves recovering securely, even after sophisticated cyberattacks. 

Traditional backup solutions often fall short for several reasons, including slow response times that do not meet user demands and increased risks associated with off-site backup management. These shortcomings stem from the inflexibility of recovery systems, which are usually designed to address infrastructure failures such as hardware breakdowns, natural disasters, and power outages. 

Therefore, relying on backups and traditional recovery solutions is no longer an option. IT teams must implement a recovery plan which meets the needs of evolving cyber security threats.

Prioritise Clean Recovery, Not Just Fast Recovery 

Recovering data from contaminated backups without proper inspection can result in the reinstallation of potential malware, making it impossible to achieve true resilience without thorough examination and isolation. As cyberattacks, particularly ransomware, become increasingly sophisticated, traditional backup plans are no longer sufficient to recover and protect data.

Organisations must therefore adapt these backup recovery processes to incorporate the use of clean rooms. An isolated clean room allows IT teams to verify and recover sensitive data and IT systems from backups within a secure environment, before restoring it to production. This prevents the reintroduction of malicious or contaminated data.

Clean rooms must be maintained in an enclosed space, under a separate network, storage, hardware and software, alongside secure access controls. Implementing least privilege access controls are also important to limit accessibility and help ensure security. 

Immutable Backups within Air-Gapped Systems

Attackers know backups are the last safety net, so they target them first. Ransomware attackers increasingly target backup repositories, attempting to encrypt or delete them. Backups stored on live production networks are especially vulnerable.

That is why it is important to not only improve and accelerate threat detection but also employ the use of immutable within air-gapped system. This backup defence offers the highest level of data protection by combining the security of non-modifiable data and the physical isolation of backups. This prevents the backups of data from being modified or deleted once created, which are kept in isolated locations, preventing ransomware or other cyber threats from gaining access. 

Reduce Dwell Time with Continuous Detection

Cyber intrusions often go undetected for days or even weeks. The longer an attacker remains undetected in an organisation’s systems, the harder it is to identify when your backups were last clean. Many ransomware dwell times exceed 10 days, meaning the recovery of snapshots from backups could be weeks old. This risks significant data, productivity and financial loss, calling for faster intrusion detection and shorter intervals between clean backup checkpoints.

Security teams need to combine various security tools and systems, specifically those for monitoring endpoint devices, networks, and cloud environments. This integration includes: 

• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions

• Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services

These tools work together to quickly identify potential security threats such as unauthorised privilege escalation, data staging (preparing data for theft), and unusual encryption activities. 

By accelerating detection response times, organisations can spot unusual activity or issues within minutes, trigger automated containment, and preserve recent, uncompromised snapshots for rapid, clean recovery.

Automate End-to-End Testing

A backup system is only as trustworthy as its testing, but too many plans go untested or are spot checked rather than fully validated. Modern solutions now support automated recovery testing to confirm data integrity and plan effectiveness. This is critical for avoiding surprises during an actual recovery event and to validate recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Backup Complexity Is Increasing 

Today’s modern enterprise environments now include on-premises, cloud, SaaS (like Microsoft 365), and remote endpoints. This hybrid ecosystem makes consistent backup coverage challenging, with less than half (40%) of IT professionals expressing a lack of confidence in their current backup systems.

In this environment, organisations must adopt a multi-layered backup platform to eliminate the fragmentation of overlapping point tools within a single management system. This platform should evolve seamlessly as workloads, regulations, and threat vectors change. This allows IT Teams to gain real-time visibility into backup health, shrink licensing costs and streamline management.  

Such a platform lets administrators define one set of retention, encryption, and immutability policies that automatically cascade across every tier. This includes local hot copies for rapid file restores, cloud replicas for disaster fail-over, immutable object storage for ransomware defence, and offline or gated “air-gapped” vaults for last-resort recovery. 

As businesses navigate an increasingly complex digital landscape, rethinking backup and recovery strategies should no longer be seen as a compliance check box but as an essential defence. Organisations that ensure data integrity, enforce immutability, and conduct regular testing will be better equipped regardless of how threat actors or regulations evolve in the future. Embracing this mindset is essential for creating robust barriers and long-term sustainability in today's threat landscape.