Most organisations are not testing their backup solutions, and this may render them worthless with dire consequences, especially in virtualised environments.
So said Jessica van Wyk, channel manager at Veeam Software, a virtual infrastructure management and data protection solutions vendor.
Van Wyk noted that, according to a survey of 500 companies that was recently carried out by VMware globally, only about 2% of organisations are testing their backup solutions.
"Your backup is just as good as your last restore. If you can't restore backup, it's worthless; it's actually a useless thing to have. The only time organisations are realising that this is such a big issue is when they do have to restore and there is a problem with the backup," she said.
"We have an example of a customer in South Africa who lost three months' worth of data because of failing to test the backup solution."
She believes the majority of organisations are not testing these solutions because they do not have the time and resources to do so. "It actually becomes unfeasible that companies just can't do it economically and logistically."
Warren Olivier, territory manager at Veeam, says organisations sometimes have a false sense of security because they're running backups and getting confirmation that the backups were successful.
However, he also points out that backup software is only as good as its last restore. "When last did you test that you could actually restore a machine from your backups? You could be backing up a serious problem that won't reveal itself until the day you need to restore - and then it's too late," says Olivier.
The risk is significant, he adds. "Of 500 companies VMware surveyed, 43% had experienced a data loss within the past two years, and failed recoveries cost them an average of R3.5 million a year. Yet only 2% of backups were ever tested."
Anti-virus updates, operating system upgrades and patches are among the most common causes of recovery failures, says Olivier.
"These changes require a system reboot, which could result in an inconsistent operating system or application state. Machines suffer from this issue all the time - you reboot and get to a blue screen or application problem, then have to roll back to the last known good configuration, or try and restore from a successful backup.
"That's fine if you reboot immediately after the upgrade and your last known good configuration was yesterday," adds Olivier. "But reducing the amount of downtime and rebooting machines less often is one of the primary benefits of virtualisation - not to mention a top requirement in most SLAs. You could have been running for weeks or months with a problem quietly incubating, waiting for a reboot to commit the changes that will mess up your server."
Olivier has seen at least one client lose months' of data to exactly this kind of hidden trap. "His backup software told him the backups were successful, and they were - but the restore wasn't. To make matters worse, those assurances gave him a false sense of security and he was careless in the reboot process, thinking he could always do a recovery if there was a problem. Sometimes a false sense of security can be far worse than no security at all."
Thus, he points out that the only way to manage risk is to test backups. He claims that Veeam's backup and replication tools make the testing process automated, fast and economically viable.
"We can restore a machine in 20 seconds and have you at the logon screen in two minutes. That changes the whole game - suddenly testing every backup, every day is entirely feasible."
The process can be entirely automated, he adds. "Few people want to baby-sit their backup and recovery jobs, so an automated process that delivers a high-level report meets their requirements. There are also compliance requirements around backups, and this makes it easy to meet those requirements."
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