Most ransomware recovery programs fail in the same place, and it has nothing to do with the tools. Teams buy immutability, buy detection, pass the audit, and never once rehearse restoring real data under pressure, which means the first full run of their recovery process happens during an attack.
That’s the argument of this piece, and it colors how I read the tooling market too. Platforms like Eon matter here because rehearsal only became cheap when search started taking seconds and restoring one table stopped requiring a full environment rebuild, and cheap rehearsal is the whole game.
Recovery is a skill, and skills decay
A recovery plan is a document, but a recovery is a performance, executed at 3am by whoever answered the page, and the gap between the two is where companies get hurt. The runbook assumes people who have changed teams, consoles that have been redesigned, and calm nobody has during a countdown.
Skills hold up under pressure when they’ve been used recently, and that’s as true for restoring a database as it is for landing a plane. Nobody would board a flight with a pilot who had only read about landings, yet most organizations run exactly that experiment with their data.
Why the drills never happened
The honest reason drills got skipped is that they used to be miserable. When restoring anything meant rehydrating a full environment, a practice run tied up people and infrastructure for days, so practice fell off every calendar, and the audit box got ticked with a file test that proved nothing.
The economics have changed, and Eon is a good example of why. When you can search backups in seconds and restore a single table without touching the rest of the environment, a meaningful drill fits inside a Tuesday afternoon, and the old excuse has aged out even if the habit hasn’t.
What a real rehearsal looks like
A real drill restores an actual production dataset to an isolated target, under a clock, and it starts earlier than most teams expect: whoever runs it has to find the right recovery point, because picking the newest backup rehearses the easy case, and ransomware never presents it.
Run it quarterly on something that matters, rotate who executes it so the skill spreads, and add one tabletop a year for the scenario where the backup admin’s own credentials are compromised. Then write the elapsed time somewhere leadership reads, because that number improving is the entire point.
Practice is the product
Every feature on a backup datasheet is a promise about what will happen on your worst day, and rehearsing a recovery is the only way to test that promise while a failure is still cheap.
The teams that recover well from ransomware are simply the teams that had already done it several times before it counted.
Book the drill. The tooling argument, the budget argument, and the audit argument all get easier once there’s a number on the board.
Frequently asked questions
What should a ransomware recovery drill include?
A timed restore of a real production dataset to an isolated target, starting from clean-point identification, with the elapsed time recorded and reported. If the drill skips finding the right recovery point, it isn’t rehearsing the part that fails in real incidents.
Do recovery drills risk production data?
No, drills restore into isolated accounts or environments, so production is never touched. The risk worth managing is scheduling, since a drill that keeps getting postponed provides the same protection as no drill at all.
What’s the difference between a backup test and a recovery drill?
A backup test confirms data was written and can be read, while a recovery drill proves your team can find a clean recovery point and get a real dataset back under time pressure. Passing the first while failing the second is the most common gap in ransomware readiness.
