For corporates, prevention is often perceived as a cost rather than an investment. Consequently, anything that isn’t strictly mandatory tends to be postponed, or addressed with minimal effort. Backup is no exception to this generalized, often preserved, concept.
Backup fits perfectly into this pattern. Generally speaking, everyone knows what a backup is, but the definition remains largely theoretical. “Keep copies of data so we can restore it in the event of loss”. However, backup is much more than that.
As a matter of fact, backup is a strategical asset, not a requirement!
When approached with a prevention-oriented tactic, backup management can transform into a data governance and business intelligence pillar. Capable, with no exaggeration, of offering a comprehensive and measurable view of corporate resilience, both technically and operationally.
To reach this level of maturity, however, it is necessary to understand the real critical issues that are limiting organizations today.
The Concrete Challenges
Analyzing the backup world from the inside reveals 6 major, cross-cutting “pain points” that make data management risky and inefficient.
- “Restore Anxiety”: Everyone performs backups, but almost no one performs restore tests. Companies are lulled into a false sense of security by “green lights” on the dashboard (“Job completed successfully”), ignoring that a corrupt or incomplete backup is effectively useless.
In reality, a very high percentage of restore attempts fail right when they are needed most. This happens because there is a lack of time and resources to test data recovery at scale before a disaster occurs. - “Data Sprawl” and Hybrid Fragmentation: Data no longer resides in a single location. it is scattered everywhere: on-premises, across different clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure), on SaaS platforms, and on employee laptops. Managing these fragmented silos without a “single pane of glass” is nearly impossible.
The result is the rise of “Shadow IT”: critical data residing on cloud services that central IT is unaware of and has no real control over. - Backup as the Primary Ransomware Target: Backup used to be the life insurance policy. Today, it is the hacker’s primary target. Modern ransomware attacks (like LockBit) are designed to seek out and destroy backups before encrypting production data, forcing the company to pay. Many organizations still operate with non-isolated backup architectures, lacking immutability mechanisms, leaving the entire protection strategy vulnerable.
- The Gap Between Business Expectations and IT Reality: Since backup is considered a “technical matter,” a dangerous misalignment occurs. Management is convinced operations can restart in minutes after an incident, while the IT department knows it could take days.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) targets are often defined in obsolete documents based on theoretical estimates and never updated to reflect the exponential growth of data volumes, leaving the business in the dark about the real operational risks. - Hidden Costs and “Zombie Data”: Out of fear of losing something, there is a tendency to protect everything indiscriminately. This leads companies to store petabytes of ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) data that has no value. A waste that causes storage costs to explode, especially in the cloud, and clogs up backup windows, diverting precious resources away from the data that actually matters.
- Compliance as Bureaucracy, Not Strategy: Many companies limit themselves to doing the bare minimum to avoid penalties. Yet regulations like GDPR and NIS2 require knowing exactly where data is located and who accesses it.
Most traditional backup systems operate as a “black box”. In which the IT department has a backup file, but access to the data inside is limited and requires complex procedures.
Consequently, responding to an audit becomes a manual process that consumes time and resources, often relying on Excel spreadsheets and misaligned data.
The Solution Starts with a Mindset Shift, But There Is Something That Can Help
Solving these problems is, objectively, a technical challenge. Knowing how to manage and understand backups is a job for professionals. Though, it is necessary for management to become aware of this process, because compliance must be seen as an investment, as it helps companies structure themselves consciously. Allowing them not only more resilient, but also more productive in so many ways.
Gaining control over such a specific sector is not simple, but Salazar was born precisely to address these critical issues. Salazar centralizes data onto a single platform and clearly visualizes RPO and RTO values not just for individual assets, but for entire business functionalities, such as a specific department or service. Updating them continuously and enabling a downloadable analysis report(s).
Thanks to Salazar, not only will audits will be simple to address, but also the software solution facilitates strategic decisions by business concerning the management of costs, corporate resilience through real, up-to-date, and easy-to-consult and understand data.
Salazar, one of ours, The Governance & Compliance Cyber Resilience Solution, is “Your unified source of truth for RPO & RTO”!
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