This article has been supplied and will be available for a limited time only on this website. Zander Brewis, Technical Alignment Manager at IPT
Businesses are producing and retaining more data every year, often across a growing mix of systems, cloud platforms, email environments, and shared repositories. That creates an obvious storage challenge, but storage capacity is only part of the problem.
Many organisations assume they are protected because data is being copied somewhere. That can create confidence without proof. A backup may have been configured years ago and left largely unattended, or a job may have stopped because the available storage filled up. The data may also be copied successfully without anyone ever testing whether it can be restored.
That is why I regard recovery testing as the real measure of a backup strategy. A backup that has never been restored remains unproven, regardless of how reassuring the reporting dashboard may look.
Storage should follow business priorities
