World Backup Day warns firms on untested recoveries

As World Backup Day draws attention to data protection, technology experts are warning that many organisations still rely on untested backup systems. The growing use of artificial intelligence in business is heightening questions about how companies protect and validate critical information.

Mid-market enterprises are a particular concern. Industry specialists say many have invested in backup tools but have not verified whether those systems can restore full operations after a cyberattack or major outage.

Kevin Charest, PhD, vice president of cyber governance at Netrio, warned of the operational risk created when backup processes go untested for long periods.

"Backups are essential, but what people don't realize is that for mid-market enterprises, too many organizations set up a backup job and then never test it. The first time they try a full restore is in the middle of a crisis - and that's when they discover the process broke months ago, or that the backups themselves have been compromised. So, the important question on World Backup Day should be, 'Have you done testing to prove that you can restore your business from your backups?' It's important to have a regular schedule of testing and validation."

"Another challenge among mid-market enterprises is that security often lags business growth, and companies end up doing 'just enough' on backups, which is a dangerous gamble. A single incident where your backups fail - or worse, have been silently tampered with - can be the difference between a bad day and no business at all," Charest said.

Cybersecurity specialists say many backup weaknesses only become clear once systems are already down. In some cases, attackers target backup repositories, leaving organisations without a clean recovery point and extending downtime.

Ransomware has sharpened the focus on backup integrity and isolation. For mid-sized firms without large in-house security teams, the difference between having backups and having tested, recoverable backups has become central to risk planning.

That concern reflects a broader pattern in mid-market companies, where IT investment often trails business expansion. As digital infrastructure grows, backup schedules, validation routines and incident response plans can fall behind, increasing the risk that recovery procedures will fail when they are needed most.

Industry observers say regular recovery drills and full restore tests are becoming as important as backup jobs themselves. Boards and executives are also asking more questions about how quickly core services can be restored and how much data loss would be acceptable during a severe disruption.

The growing use of AI in enterprise environments is adding another dimension to those discussions. Data used for machine learning models, recommendation engines and predictive analytics carries value beyond its immediate operational role.

Alex Segeda, business development director, EMEAI at WD, said World Backup Day now comes in a very different context as organisations experiment with large-scale AI deployments and data-intensive workloads.

"On World Backup Day, the message is simple: back up your data. But in 2026, that reminder carries far more weight - especially for organisations building and operating AI systems."

"For AI-driven environments, data preservation isn't just about recovering from a failure. It's about protecting the raw material that future intelligence depends on. Every dataset captured today has the potential to train better models, reveal new insights, and unlock optimisations months or even years down the line. Lose that data, and you're not just losing files. You're losing potential future capability and innovation."

"For data centre operators managing exabyte-scale environments, resilience goes beyond backups. It also means ensuring storage infrastructure can match real-world operational demands: predictable power behaviour, consistent performance across lifecycle stages, and failover modes that are transparent rather than disruptive."

"So this World Backup Day, the real question isn't simply whether your data is backed up. It's whether your infrastructure is resilient enough to keep tomorrow's AI innovation running," Segeda said.

Storage vendors and managed service providers say customers are increasingly asking about data immutability, geographic redundancy, and the impact of equipment failures on AI workloads. They are also under pressure to balance resilience with cost, energy use and regulatory requirements around data residency.

For large data centre operators handling exabyte-scale volumes, those comments underline how infrastructure design now sits alongside backup as a core resilience issue. Predictable power behaviour and consistent performance across the storage hardware lifecycle affect both uptime and the economics of running AI and analytics services.

As data volumes rise and AI projects move from pilot to production, specialists say businesses of all sizes are reassessing what level of risk is acceptable. The gap between having a backup policy on paper and having a proven route back to normal operations is receiving greater scrutiny at the board level.

For mid-market firms, that reassessment often starts with basic questions about when backup jobs were last tested and who owns recovery plans. For operators of large-scale infrastructure, it increasingly means stress-testing storage systems against real-world failure scenarios and sustained AI workloads.

Together, Charest and Segeda present World Backup Day as a prompt for organisations to examine their assumptions about resilience. In a year shaped by cyber threats and AI adoption, success may depend less on whether data exists somewhere in a backup set and more on whether it can be trusted, accessed and restored when it matters most.