Schrödinger's backup: not actually recovered until you try to restore IT
Schrödinger's Cat, the famous 1935 thought experiment, imagines a cat that, for reasons rooted in quantum physics we need not dwell on here, is simultaneously alive and dead.
In a landscape of relentless cyberattacks and mounting infrastructural complexity, a routine backup task can appear finished, with every box ticked and every check made.
The job is not actually done, however, until it has been verified as fully ready for recovery in the event of cyber disaster.
A task that looks sorted can turn out, under scrutiny, to be anything but.
A backup can be logged as 'complete' once data has been copied to storage, but a recoverable workload is another matter entirely.
It means that when a business goes down, its workloads can be restored to their state at the point of attack with nothing lost.
By the time you realize you are on the wrong side of that ambiguity, it may be too late: your data is in the hands of the bad guys, or destroyed, and this time the cat really is dead.
This is not a problem to which IT bosses and managed service provider (MSP) management are entirely oblivious.
Most organizations recognize to some degree that their backup may not be 100 percent watertight.
Cybersecurity management specialist Kaseya recently partnered with 1105 Media to survey 200 IT professionals about the realities shaping cyber resilience planning.
Some 53 percent were no more than 'somewhat confident' in their organization's ability to fully recover from a ransomware attack, and admitted their backups were supported by no better than 'limited testing'.
A significant proportion had even less faith in their recovery capabilities, while only 15 percent were 'very confident' they could get back on track with no loss.
Verify and survive Understanding what a verified backup means, and what role verification plays in the recovery challenge weighing on so many IT leaders, is where any sensible resilience plan begins.
Backups are vital but they do not guarantee recovery on their own.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theregister.com — the content belongs to The Register.
