Harry Stamper in Armageddon said it best: “Backup plan. You gotta have some kind of backup plan.” Even Jim from The Office had one — “I knew we’d need a backup plan. The boat was actually Plan C.” The point? Every hero, real or fictional, knows the value of a safety net. Your organization’s data is no different. A solid backup and recovery plan is your last line of defense in cybersecurity.
Unfortunately, some organizations consider backup as nothing more than a duplicate copy of their organization’s files and data, standing by in case they’re needed. Others see it as a chore, a time-consuming obligation that must be checked off the to-do list each month. But with mean-time-to-identification (MTTI) of a data breach at 181 days, backup is much more than either of these. When data loss hits your organization due to cyberattack, hardware failure, or human error, your backup and recovery solution suddenly becomes the most important tool in your cyber resilience tool kit.
As a last line of defense, a unified backup solution prepares your organization for “What if?” scenarios by ensuring your critical data is secure, accessible, and recoverable. Without it, your organization won’t be able to fully recover from catastrophic data loss and maintain business continuity.
Keep your data secure
What if your backup plan doesn’t protect your data from malware, corruption, and unauthorized access? This can leave your organization vulnerable to data loss and extensive downtime because the data breach may compromise both your primary systems and backups simultaneously. Keep your data secure by implementing a multi-layered defense with encryption and immutable, chainless backups.
- A backup solution that encrypts your organization’s data at rest and in transit secures your backups from data breaches.
- Chainless backup creates a complete, self-contained image of the system at the specific point of the backup. This isolates corrupted backups so one bad backup doesn’t infect others. It allows each backup to be restored independently, further reducing the chance for a data breach to infect your entire system.
- Immutable storage prevents malicious actors from altering or deleting the data on your backup servers. It also protects against an IT admin or other internal user from accidentally (or intentionally) altering or deleting data.
These three features provide extra security against ransomware, insider threats, or even just accidental deletions.
A final, important piece of data security is how you dispose of data and the media where it’s stored. Your backup plan is not complete without a procedure in place for the secure disposal of old or obsolete backup media. Secure disposal of old or obsolete data helps prevent identity and intellectual property theft. In addition, many compliance regulations, such as HIPAA, NIS2, DORA, and GDPR, require organizations to have a plan for secure disposal of sensitive or personal data.
Keep your data accessible
What if a natural disaster damages or destroys the building where your backup servers are housed? Best practice calls for the 3-2-1 rule: keep 3 copies of your data on at least 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy stored offsite. Cloud-based backup solutions make it easier for you to follow the 3-2-1 rule and make it easier to back up and restore data across your entire IT estate, regardless of location. You also get the added peace of mind that your backup data won’t be damaged or destroyed by fire, flood, hurricane, theft, or hardware damage that could destroy on-site backups.
With cloud-based backups, you also have more flexibility in the amount of storage space you use. You don’t have to plan for or wait for that requisition to be approved for more on-prem servers to accommodate your growing data backup needs.
Keep your data recoverable
What if you can’t recover your backup data quickly enough or, worse, you can’t recover it at all? According to IBM’s 2025 Data Breach report, while key business functions are generally restored quickly after a data breach, only 2% of organizations report full recovery within 50 days, and 76% report recovery taking up to 150 days. A full 65% report they never fully recover from a data breach. Those are some daunting numbers.
While data recovery is only part of the battle, it’s a key, first step. Testing your backup and recovery process goes a long way to helping you recover quickly. Test at a minimum annually, but quarterly or monthly would be even better. By testing your process before a failure, you’ll be better equipped to quickly restore files when the need arises.
As mentioned in the preceding section, cloud-based, immutable backups and data encryption at rest and in transit help ensure your recovered data is up-to-date and usable.
Being able to recover quickly helps you get your data and IT processes back on track, which in turn keeps your business moving. A robust backup and recovery tool and plan also minimize the impact on end users and customers, while helping to mitigate potential damage to your company’s reputation.
Backup is security
A unified backup and recovery solution gives you the security of knowing you can maintain business continuity, so your organization’s reputation remains strong, and your customers’ sensitive information is protected.
Learn more about NinjaOne’s cloud-based unified backup solution.
