Q&A: Why Successful Backups Don't Guarantee Recovery
TechTarget, Tuesday, October 20th, 2026
Adastra's Obuks Akpede explains why green backup dashboards mislead and how to prove you can restore business services under pressure.
Immutable copies, defined RPOs and clean audit reports do not prove an organization can recover, says Obuks Akpede, a data governance consultant at Adastra.
In this Q&A he argues recovery must be designed into the operating model, with tested failure scenarios and cross-functional coordination on what comes back first.
Restores often fail on hidden dependencies such as DNS, identity, messaging, middleware and shared storage, and recovery data can itself become an attack path back in.
His top tip: stop tracking backup success rates and ask for evidence of the last full end-to-end recovery of the top business services.