The Resilience Myth: Why Backups Aren't Enough

Most MSPs feel reasonably comfortable saying they have backups in place. Jobs are running, reports look clean, storage usage ticks along in the background. On the surface, everything looks fine.

But when something breaks, the real question is never "do we have backups". It's "how quickly, and how safely, can we get this client back".

That gap between "backed up" and "recoverable" is where resilience actually lives. It's the gap that gets exposed during outages, mistakes and security incidents, not in the monthly backup summary.

Resilience is less about the product you use and more about the habits your team keeps. That’s something we often hear from MSP leaders: the providers who walk out of incidents with client trust intact are the ones who treat recovery as part of everyday operations, not a one-off project.

Many MSPs have backups but have not tested recovery

When MSPs talk honestly about incidents, a familiar pattern shows up.

Backups existed. Jobs were running. Dashboards were mostly green. But when it came time to restore, things were slower, messier or riskier than anyone expected.

Common stories included:

• Snapshots that had expired without anyone noticing

• Backup sets that did not match the current production layout

• Dependencies like DNS, identity or integration points that were never part of the DR plan

On paper, protection looked solid. In practice, the path back was unclear.

You see the same issue in wider research. Many organisations run backups but only a minority test full recovery on a regular schedule, which means a lot of DR plans are unproven until the day they are needed. That’s not a comfortable time to discover gaps.

Misconfigurations, expired snapshots and unclear ownership are the real failure points

When recoveries fail, the first reaction is often to blame the tool. In reality, the deeper problem is usually how it's being run.

A few themes kept surfacing in our conversations with MSPs:

• No clear owner for DR: Disaster recovery sat "with the team". Everyone cared about it in theory. No one was explicitly accountable in practice.

• Runbooks that no longer match reality: Environments had moved or grown. New workloads were added, networks were restructured, applications were refactored. The DR plan still described a previous version of the world.

• Testing that keeps getting pushed back: DR tests were on the list, but always behind tickets, projects and urgent client work. Months passed without a proper restore exercise. Because nothing visibly failed, the risk stayed hidden.

• Configuration drift over time: Quick fixes and small exceptions slowly pulled systems away from the original design. The backup product kept doing what it was told. What it was told was no longer what the business actually needed during an outage.

The lesson is simple. The tool only works as well as the process wrapped around it.

Resilience should be a regular practice, not a checkbox

The good news is that resilience does not depend on exotic technology. It depends on doing sensible things consistently.

The MSPs who felt confident about recovery tended to approach it in a similar way.

Test on purpose, not by accident

They do not wait for an incident to find out what happens. Restore tests are planned. Sometimes that’s a small, file level restore. Sometimes it's a full workload. For key clients, it can be a structured DR exercise with agreed objectives and a review afterwards.

Make someone clearly responsible

Disaster recovery has an owner. That person might not carry out every step, but they are responsible for keeping plans current, ensuring tests happen and making sure lessons turn into changes.

Keep DR documentation alive

Runbooks are treated as working documents, not audit paperwork. When environments change, DR steps are updated as part of the change. Instructions are written in straightforward language so an engineer can follow them in the middle of the night without guesswork.

Build recovery into service design

New services are not considered complete until backup, recovery and failover behaviour are defined and demonstrated. Resilience is part of the offer, not something bolted on once the project is delivered.

Reliable platforms should support testing and shared responsibility

People and process are the heart of resilience, but the platform still has a role to play.

Some hosting environments make even basic testing painful. The right platform makes it easier to build resilience into normal operations by letting you:

• Spin up test restores without putting production at risk

• Prove backups are immutable and have not been tampered with

• Keep client environments separated so one failure does not spread

• See quickly which jobs are healthy, which are failing and where patterns are emerging

• Offer disaster recovery options that match different RTO and RPO needs

Just as important is the partner behind that platform.

Steve Agamalis from ICTechnology puts it clearly:

“Switching from on-prem to hosted setups has saved us, as maintaining equipment and resources used to eat up our time. With all the threats out there, security’s now the biggest challenge, so we’re zeroing in on that over patching and licensing. A partner handling failover lets us focus on supporting our own clients with compliance, documentation, insurance and security measures – areas they often overlook amid daily operations.”

That is what a good infrastructure relationship should do: take weight off your team so they can focus on the parts of resilience your clients see and feel.

Servers Australia’s MSP platform is built with that in mind. DR-aware infrastructure, immutable backup options and local engineers who understand MSP delivery make it easier to turn resilience from a line on a proposal into something your team practises every month.

Start testing resilience, not just backups

If your current approach to resilience starts and ends with "the backups are green", it's worth taking another look.

Real resilience shows up in how often you test, how clearly people understand their role, and how confident you feel when something does go wrong.

For MSPs, that difference is what protects both your clients’ operations and your own reputation when it matters most.