A backup strategy that has never actually been tested by a real restore is, in a very practical sense, not really a backup strategy at all, just an assumption. Here is what a genuinely reliable cloud backup and disaster recovery setup actually looks like.
Backup and disaster recovery are not the same thing
Backup means your data exists somewhere safe if something goes wrong. Disaster recovery means you have an actual plan and process to get your business operational again, within a defined timeframe, after something goes badly wrong. A business can have backups and still face days of downtime if there is no tested plan for actually using them to restore operations.
The 3-2-1 rule, still relevant in 2026
Three copies of your data, on two different types of storage media, with one copy stored off-site (or in a genuinely separate cloud region). This protects against the range of realistic failure scenarios: a single hardware failure, a site-wide incident, and even a targeted ransomware attack that might otherwise encrypt a backup sitting on the same network as your primary data.
Two numbers every business should actually know
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. If your last backup was six hours before an incident, you lose six hours of data; if that is unacceptable for your business, you need more frequent backups. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): how long you can afford to be down before it seriously damages the business. These two numbers should directly shape your backup frequency and your recovery approach, rather than being decided after the fact by whatever the backup tool happens to default to.
Ransomware changed what "backup" needs to mean
Modern ransomware actively targets connected backups, which means an accessible, continuously-connected backup is not fully protected against it. Immutable backups (that cannot be altered or deleted even by an attacker with access to your systems) and air-gapped or logically isolated copies have become a genuine necessity, not an optional extra, for any business holding data an attacker would want to hold hostage.
The step almost everyone skips: testing the restore
A backup that has never actually been restored and verified is an assumption, not a guarantee, and the worst time to discover a backup was silently corrupted or incomplete is during an actual emergency when you desperately need it to work. Regular, scheduled restore tests are the difference between a backup strategy and a backup hope.
If you are not confident your current backup setup would actually get your business back up and running within a timeframe you could live with, our infrastructure team can review your current setup and show you the gaps.