Having Backups Is Not the Same as Being Ready to Recover

Most businesses understand that backups are important.

Files are copied. Systems report successful jobs. Backup dashboards show green checkmarks. From an operational perspective, that can create a reassuring conclusion:

“We’re backed up.”

But there is a much more important question:

If your systems went down tomorrow morning, how confident are you that the business could actually recover?

That is the difference between having recovery capability and having recovery confidence.

A Successful Backup Is Only the Beginning

Imagine arriving Monday morning and discovering that critical systems are unavailable.

Your backup platform shows that the previous night’s backup completed successfully.

That’s good news — but now the real questions begin.

What gets restored first: email, accounting, customer records, or the file server? How long will each restoration take? Are the backups accessible and intact? Are the credentials needed for recovery available? Who coordinates the recovery while employees are unable to work?

A successful backup tells you that data was copied.

It doesn’t tell you how quickly the business can get back to work.

Recovery Is Becoming a Target

This distinction matters even more as cyberattacks evolve.

Google Cloud’s M-Trends 2026 research describes ransomware increasingly as a resilience problem. Attackers are not necessarily interested only in disrupting production systems. They may also target backup systems and other infrastructure an organization depends on to recover.

That means the systems designed to help the business recover can themselves become part of the attack.

If recovery points are deleted, administrative access is compromised, or backup infrastructure is affected by the same incident as production systems, having backups may not provide the protection the organization expected.

Recovery planning therefore has to consider not only where backups exist, but whether they remain accessible and trustworthy during an incident.

Canadian Organizations Are Recovering Better — But There Is Still a Gap

The 2026 TELUS Canadian Ransomware Study provides an interesting perspective.

Based on responses from more than 500 Canadian organizations, 64% reported being able to completely restore their data following their most recent ransomware incident, compared with 42% in TELUS’s earlier study.

That’s significant progress.

But another finding deserves attention: 39% reported being reinfected by the same ransomware attack after the initial recovery.

That highlights an important distinction.

Restoring data and safely recovering the business are not necessarily the same thing.

If systems are restored before the original compromise is understood and contained, an organization may simply restore itself back into an unsafe environment.

Recovery Confidence Has to Be Proven

Confidence doesn't come from knowing that backups exist.

It comes from testing what happens when they are actually needed.

Organizations should be able to answer practical questions such as:

• What are our most critical systems?
• In what order would we restore them?
• How much data could we afford to lose?
• How long could each system remain unavailable?
• Are critical backups protected from the production environment?
• Have we successfully restored from them?
• Who has the credentials and authority needed to begin recovery?
• How would employees operate while systems are being restored?
  

These aren't simply technical questions.

If email, accounting, customer records, shared files, communications or core applications are unavailable, recovery quickly becomes an operational issue involving leadership, employees, customers and potentially outside providers.

Recovery Plans Need Realistic Testing

A recovery plan that has never been tested contains assumptions.

A restore test turns some of those assumptions into evidence.

That doesn’t mean every business needs to simulate a catastrophic ransomware attack every month. Testing can be proportional to the environment.

Restore a file. Recover a server. Validate a critical application. Confirm recovery credentials. Review who is responsible for each step.

Periodically walk through what would happen if a critical system suddenly became unavailable.

The objective is simple: discover recovery problems while there is still time to fix them — not during the incident itself.

Backups Provide Capability. Testing Builds Confidence.

Backups remain an essential part of business continuity.

But a successful backup should never be confused with proof that the organization can recover.

The stronger question isn’t:

“Do we have backups?”

It’s:

“If something happened tomorrow, how do we know we could recover?”

Organizations that can answer that question clearly have moved beyond simply protecting data. They understand what needs to happen when systems fail, who needs to act, and how operations can be restored.

A backup tells you your data exists somewhere else.

Recovery confidence tells you whether your business can actually get back to work.

Sources

TELUS Business. 2026 Canadian Ransomware Study. Canadian ransomware recovery and reinfection findings. View source

Google Cloud / Mandiant. M-Trends 2026 Executive Edition. Ransomware and cyber resilience findings. View source

Google Cloud / Mandiant. Isolated Recovery Environments: A Critical Layer in Modern Cyber Resilience. View source