Updated: July 02, 2026
A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a safety net. And increasingly, it is the first thing an attacker goes after. In the Sophos State of Ransomware 2025 study, 94% of organisations hit by ransomware said the attackers tried to compromise their backups, and 57% of those attempts succeeded. The copy you were relying on to avoid paying a ransom is now a target in its own right.
That changes what data protection has to mean. It is no longer enough to take a backup and hope. The job is to make recovery a tested fact, resilient to an attacker who is actively trying to take your last line of defence away.
A backup is a copy of your data. Cyber recovery is the ability to restore cleanly after an attack, even when the attacker has tried to corrupt or delete those copies. Backup answers "Do we have the data?"; cyber recovery answers "can we get the business running again, from data we know is clean, within a time the business can survive?" The first is necessary. Only the second actually protects you.
Because attackers have learned that the backup is the weak point. If they can encrypt or delete your backups before triggering the ransomware, your options collapse to paying. That is precisely why almost every ransomware attack now includes an attempt on the backups, and why more than half of those attempts succeed. Organisations whose backups are compromised face markedly worse outcomes, including substantially higher ransom demands. A backup architecture designed for accidental data loss is not designed for a deliberate adversary, and the gap between the two is where recovery plans fail.
Four capabilities, working together. Immutable backups that cannot be altered or deleted once written. Isolation, an air gap or a logically separated copy, so an attacker inside your network cannot reach them. Tested recovery, with defined and rehearsed recovery-time and recovery-point objectives, so you know how fast you can come back. And a clean recovery environment to restore into, rather than back into a compromised network. The table sets out what each does and why it matters.
| Capability | What It Does | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Immutable backups | Prevents copies being changed or deleted | Survives an attacker who reaches the backups |
| Air-gap / isolation | Keeps a copy out of the attacker's reach | Stops backups being encrypted with everything else |
| Tested recovery (RTO/RPO) | Proves how fast and how complete recovery is | Turns recovery from a hope into a known quantity |
| Clean-room recovery | Restores into a safe, isolated environment | Avoids re-infecting from the same network |
| Monitoring and alerting | Detects tampering and failures early | Catches problems before you need to recover |
The principle behind all four: assume the attacker will reach your backups, and design so that recovery still works when they do.
Disaster recovery as a service provides a managed, ready-to-use recovery environment, so you can fail over to it rather than building and maintaining your own second site. It suits organisations that need strong recovery capability without the cost and effort of running a full secondary data center. Whether it is right for you depends on your recovery-time targets, your existing sites and your team's capacity. The honest answer for some estates is a self-managed DR design; for others, DRaaS is the more practical path. The decision should follow your requirements, not a default.
The ones proven to deliver immutable, recoverable protection at enterprise scale: Veeam, Veritas, Rubrik, ExaGrid and Dell EMC among them. Each has strengths for different estates, which is why the platform should be chosen for your environment, recovery targets and existing investments rather than picked from a single vendor's catalogue.
A backup product is easy to buy. A recovery you have tested that holds up when an attacker has spent days trying to break it is the thing that actually matters, and it is built, not purchased.
Proactive Data Systems designs and runs data protection and cyber recovery for Indian enterprises, built around tested, resilient recovery. We are a Cisco Preferred Cloud and AI Partner, Dell Platinum Partner and NetApp Preferred Partner, with 35 years in enterprise IT, more than 1,500 organisations served, and a 24/7 service desk in India. We are multi-OEM by design, so the platform follows your recovery requirements rather than a quota, and we design immutable, isolated and tested recovery across Veeam, Veritas, Rubrik, ExaGrid and Dell EMC.
Send us your current backup and recovery setup, and we will assess whether it would survive a real attack. Ask us for a cyber-recovery readiness assessment.
Muhammad Shariq General Manager, Data Center, Proactive Data Systems
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