The sponsored article argues that a backup should not be considered reliable merely because a copying job has completed: it must also be tested to show that systems and applications can be restored after a cyberattack or other outage. This matters because organisations may discover too late that supposedly protected data is incomplete, corrupted or unusable, leaving them unable to recover from ransomware or infrastructure failure.

A Kaseya and 1105 Media survey of 200 IT professionals found that 53% were only somewhat confident in their ability to recover fully from ransomware, with backups supported by limited testing; just 15% were very confident they could recover without loss. The article says verification should prove that backups are complete, intact and restorable, while warning that intermittent manual checks and screenshot reviews are slow, error-prone and poorly suited to complex estates spanning on-premises, SaaS and cloud systems.