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Not when did it last run. When did somebody last restore from it.

A backup job can report success every night for a year while quietly writing files that cannot be read back. Nobody discovers this on an ordinary Tuesday. They discover it on the worst day of the year.

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What is the difference between backup and disaster recovery?

A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the tested plan for getting the business working again, which includes the data but also the systems, the order things come back in, who does what, and how long it takes. A business can have perfect backups and still be down for two weeks, because nobody had worked out what to restore first.

Does Microsoft back up our Microsoft 365 data?

Not in the way most businesses assume. Microsoft guarantees the availability of its service and protects against its own infrastructure failures. It does not protect you against a staff member deleting a mailbox, a ransomware attack encrypting SharePoint, or a departing employee wiping a OneDrive, beyond limited retention windows that expire. Independent third party backup covers that gap.

LANTEK provides independent backup of Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams with point in time restore, included in the SECURE and SENTINEL plans.

How often should a restore be tested?

At least quarterly, and the test has to be a real restore of real data to a usable state, not a report saying the job completed. LANTEK rehearses restores on a schedule and records the result, because the only evidence that a backup works is a file somebody has opened after restoring it.

What does the 3-2-1 rule mean?

The 3-2-1 rule means keeping three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one of them held off site. It is the baseline most insurers and auditors expect to see. The modern addition is that one copy should be immutable, meaning it cannot be altered or deleted even by an administrator account, because ransomware now deliberately targets backups first.

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How long would it take to get us running after a ransomware attack?
That depends entirely on what was prepared beforehand, which is the honest answer. With tested backups, an immutable copy and a documented recovery order, a small business is typically working again within one to two days. Without those, recovery is measured in weeks and some of the data does not come back at all.
Do you back up on premises servers as well as cloud?
Yes. Server, workstation and cloud workloads are all covered, with the retention and recovery targets set per system rather than applied uniformly. An accounting server and a shared drive of old marketing files do not need the same treatment.
What is an immutable backup?
An immutable backup is a copy that cannot be changed or deleted for a set period, by anybody, including someone holding administrator credentials. It exists because modern ransomware looks for backups and destroys them before encrypting anything, so a backup that an administrator account can delete is a backup an attacker can delete.

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