A few years ago a local business owner called me in a panic. His office had been hit by ransomware over the weekend. Every shared drive was locked, and a ransom note was sitting on the screen. “It’s okay,” he said, “we have backups.”
When we looked closer, the backup drive had been connected to the same network the entire time. The ransomware had encrypted that too. The cloud backup he thought was running had quietly failed three months earlier and no one had noticed. What looked like protection on paper turned out to be an expensive illusion.
This is more common than most people realize. Having a backup is not the same as having a tested, recoverable backup. Real protection means the copies are stored in a way that ransomware can’t reach them, that someone is verifying the backups actually work, and that there is a clear plan for how long it will take to get the business running again.
When those pieces are missing, a single incident can turn into days or weeks of downtime. The businesses that recover quickly are almost never the ones that simply “had a backup.” They are the ones that treated backup and recovery as an ongoing process instead of a checkbox.
