With data breaches and cyberattacks on the rise, you can never be too careful. Backup testing prevents loss and minimizes cyberthreats’ impact, making it fundamental to cybersecurity. However, like many in your position, you may not consider it a priority. Are you opening yourself up to unnecessary risks by not making it part of your security strategy?

Why Make Backup Testing Part of Your Security Strategy?

Backups are copies of files, databases, applications or systems. Testing involves checking them to verify they are accurate, intact, and up to date. Its purpose is to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy and schedule, letting you make actionable changes. It also helps you recognize and address issues proactively — meaning before a threat actor makes recovery impossible.

Data loss is more common than you might think. In 2023, 46% of organizations worldwide lost some amount of sensitive information. Since these incidents can be caused by anything from human error to cyberattacks, preventing them can be challenging. This is why backups are so helpful — redundancy is crucial to recovery.

Intact backups make recovery possible. Without them, the process would be expensive. Organizations spent about $4.35 million per breach on average in 2022. In extreme cases, recovery may be impossible — you could lose weeks, months, or years of valuable files. Testing these copies is critical to your security strategy.

If you’re like many cybersecurity professionals, you don’t consider redundancy a priority. Even though 72% of organizations had to use a backup to recover at least once in 2021, 41% admitted they rarely — if ever — back up their data. Crucially, even if you create and update copies, you may still be at risk of loss.

Unfortunately, backups aren’t indestructible. Human error, bugs, hardware damage, incompatibilities, and mismatched encryption keys can cause data loss, rendering them useless. Alternatively, a tech-savvy attacker could use ransomware to encrypt all your files simultaneously, preventing you from using your copies to recover.

The Fundamentals of a Strategic Backup Testing Policy

You must first understand the fundamentals of backup testing to incorporate a high-quality policy into your security strategy.

What to Test

Several test scenarios exist, with different kinds for each data loss cause. Corruption, accidental deletion, and cyberattacks are some of the most common, but it may pay to prepare for unlikely incidents. Your backup’s storage medium, location, and size will also affect your approach. Be mindful that you’re trying to improve your security strategy.

When to Test

Prioritize periodic testing instead of kicking the can down the road for the sake of convenience. Work files may need to be backed up weekly, depending on how often information changes. Also, frequency varies depending on the type of data you’re backing up. While archives can go months without an update, you should back applications up more often.

Where to Test

If you can't prioritize everything, which backups should you test? Consider creating a risk-based schedule. You typically want to test on-site data first since it enables rapid recovery. Generally, off-site copies should only take priority if a catastrophic event threatens the integrity of all local files.

How to Incorporate Backup Testing Into Your Strategy

Testing involves selecting a scenario and simulating the recovery process. Once you create an isolated test environment to prevent unintended changes, you reproduce real-world events like accidental deletion or cyberattacks. Then, you go through the step-by-step process to restore your systems, applications, files, or databases via your backup.

Upon completion, you should have a fully restored environment. If you notice discrepancies when comparing the original to the restored version, your backups may not be fully intact. If that happens, search for anomalies like corruption, duplicate entries, or mistyped fields. Even if you don’t find anything wrong, testing helps you identify potential process improvements.

Documentation is key. You should record how long restoration took, what issues emerged, which steps you took, and whether you succeeded on the first try. This way, you can accurately estimate how long recovery will take. It also lets you know what to expect in the future. If someone else is in charge of the next round of testing, they’ll appreciate those details.

Incorporating testing into your strategy means making room in your busy schedule. Consider automation to free up time. Tools like robot process automation and artificial intelligence can automate backup creation, restoration simulation, and discrepancy detection. Since 72% of companies have adopted AI as of 2024, your employer may already have such tools.

If you automate testing, consider whether you’ll leverage periodic or trigger-based tests — or some combination of both. While evaluating various systems, applications, and files weekly or monthly is fine, it may lead to minor data loss. Setting your tools to activate when you find evidence of a breach or detect unusual network activity mitigates this issue.

Considerations for Uncommon Backup Testing Scenarios

Sometimes, assigning roles, creating schedules, and refining strategies isn’t enough. You should consider edge cases — tests for issues that only occur under unusual circumstances — for a comprehensive backup testing policy. Imagine you only prioritize accidental deletion and breach resolution. What happens when an insider threat intentionally wipes a system?

Preparing your organization for potential data loss incidents by incorporating unlikely test scenarios into your security strategy improves its security posture. Since cyberthreats and the digital landscape are ever-changing, being proactive can help. Setting yourself up for success can save time and preserve your employer’s reputation.