Almost every business owner, when asked whether they have backups, says yes. Far fewer can say when a backup was last tested, where the copies actually live, or how long it would take to get the business running again after a serious failure. “We have backups” and “we can recover” are different statements, and the gap between them is where businesses come unstuck.
A good managed IT provider in Melbourne spends as much time on recovery as on the backup itself. These are the seven gaps that turn up most often when someone finally checks.
1. No offsite or offline copy
Backups sitting on the same network as the originals will be encrypted alongside everything else in a ransomware attack. At least one copy needs to be somewhere separate and, ideally, immutable.
2. Restores are never tested
A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, not a safety net. Backups fail silently all the time. The only proof one works is a successful test restore.
3. Cloud data assumed safe
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and most software-as-a-service tools do not back up your data for you in the way people imagine. Delete something, or have an account compromised, and recovery may not be possible without a separate backup.
4. No recovery time or recovery point defined
If you have never decided how much data you can afford to lose, or how long you can afford to be down, you cannot know whether your current setup is adequate. These two numbers should drive the whole design.
5. Ransomware can reach the backups
Modern attacks deliberately hunt for and destroy backups before triggering. If your backup system uses the same credentials as your main network, it is exposed.
6. Everything in one place
A single location, however well equipped, is a single point of failure. Fire, flood, theft and hardware failure do not care how good the server is.
7. No documented recovery plan
When systems are down and everyone is stressed, it is the wrong time to be working out the steps from memory. A short written runbook, naming who does what and in what order, turns a crisis into a procedure.
None of this requires a huge budget. It requires deciding that recovery matters and checking, rather than assuming. Pick the three gaps above that worry you most and close them this month. If you would rather have someone test your recovery properly and tell you the truth about where you stand, Telco ICT Group does exactly that.
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