World Backup Day is a useful reminder to have a backup plan, but backups alone aren’t enough. For that plan to be effective, organisations also need a recovery plan, and that’s where many strategies fall short. Too often, having multiple copies of data is treated as the end goal, without considering how those copies are accessed, stored, and ultimately restored.

The reality is that backups are now part of the attack surface. If they’re always connected, poorly segmented, or inconsistently managed across endpoints, they can be compromised just as easily as primary systems, leaving organisations with data they can’t reliably recover.

Data is no longer centralised but spread across remote devices, work environments, and portable storage that often sits outside of formal IT oversight, creating gaps not just in protection, but in recoverability.

Without clear policies around how data moves, where it’s stored, and who is responsible for securing it at each stage, organisations may believe they have a backup plan in place, but lack a recovery plan that will actually work when needed. Organisations that pair backup planning with disciplined, tested recovery planning will be the ones that can restore operations with confidence when something goes wrong.