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How to minimise downtime and ensure rapid recovery

Emily Davidson

24 July 2025

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When downtime costs $9,000 per minute for large organisations, having a bullet-proof backup and recovery strategy is non-negotiable. It’s not just revenue loss that organisations have to contend with; reputational damage and customer dissatisfaction is also at stake.  

Here’s how IT leaders, security heads, and data protection teams can use data backup services to get the insights needed to keep operations going - even under the harshest failure or attack scenarios.  

Step one: Automate backups with the right frequency

Relying on manual snapshots is a recipe for inconsistent protection. Instead, implement regular automated backups tailored to your systems’ criticality: 

Databases that change often or are critical to operations: Hourly or continuous data protection (CDP) 

Less dynamic databases: Daily or weekly snapshots 

 
Automated schedules remove the potential for human error and ensure your recovery point objectives (RPOs) are met without taking your team's valuable time away from strategic priorities. 

 

Step two: Adhere to the 3-2-1 backup rule

The cornerstone of resilience for both immutable and offsite copies. This involves: 

  1. Making 3 copies of your data 
  2. Storing them on 2 different media types (e.g. disk and tape or disk and cloud) 
  3. Keeping 1 backup of data offsite (air-gapped)  

This protects your organisation against various breach and failure scenarios, including ransomware situations. 

Step three: Use snapshot technologies

Traditional full image restoration can take hours. Block-level snapshots allow you to: 

  • Instantly revert databases back to a recent state 
  • Roll back specific objects or databases to a specific point in time without full system downtime 

Data tiering can also be used here, keeping your most accessed data on high-performance media and less accessed archives on cost-effective storage, optimising both recovery speed and cost.  

Step four: Test your backups regularly

Don't wait until disaster strikes to test your defences. Build a recovery strategy that: 

  • Executes automated restore drills 
  • Validates data integrity (including malware scanning) 
  • Measures actual time-to-recovery to refine your recovery time objectives (RTOs) 

This proactive stance uncovers weak links before they bring your business to a standstill. 

Step five: Centralise monitoring and reporting

Don’t leave backups to assumption. Ensure you create a centralised place for monitoring backup health metrics, receiving capacity alerts, and facilitating compliance reporting so that your team can: 

  • Spot failed backups instantly 
  • Forecast storage growth 
  • Generate audit-ready dashboards for SOX, NIS2, or DORA compliance 

 

Step six: Future-proof with AI, multi-cloud, and Zero Trust architectures

AI-driven anomaly detection: Predict failing hardware or identify unusual backup patterns before they escalate. 

Multi-cloud strategies: Distribute backups across AWS, Azure, or private clouds to avoid dependencies on vendors.

Zero-Trust alignment: Ensure that all backup traffic and storage access is authenticated, authorised, and encrypted end-to-end. 

How these strategies will benefit your business

Minimising negative business impact: Faster recoveries translate directly to less operational disruption and revenue loss. 

Bolstering your defences: Layered protections, from immutable backups to AI monitoring, create a resilient ecosystem. 

Complying with regulations: Comprehensive reporting and offsite safeguards keep you aligned with frameworks like SOX, NIS2, and DORA. 

The next steps for enhancing your data backup and restoration processes

  • Audit your current RPO/RTO metrics against actual restore times 
  • Implement or refine your 3-2-1 backup architecture, ensuring one copy is air-gapped and immutable 
  • Deploy automated recovery testing and integrate AI-driven health checks 
  • Expand into multi-cloud backup repositories to enhance flexibility and compliance 

By turning backup and recovery from a checkbox exercise into a strategic advantage, organisations can not only minimise downtime but also protect their revenue and reputation in the process. This can be time-intensive for teams, so managed backup services are critical to preserve internal resources but ensure industry-leading data protection practices are in place.

Deep dive into our managed backup services to improve your cyber-resilience posture.