Quick summary
- Backups you can trust: Leading teams ditch slow, snapshot-only restores for granular recovery that meets RTOs.
- No blind spots, no juggling tools: Real-time classification and one cloud-native platform replace guesswork and messy scripts.
- Backups that do more: Queryable, posture-aware backups fuel compliance, analytics, and even AI to turn a safety net into a business asset.
Where Are the Cloud Backup Gaps?
Even the most cloud-forward teams are running into the same problems: missed recoveries, compliance gaps, and backups no one fully trusts. Survey data points to five key gaps that are breaking confidence and how top teams are closing them.
- A recovery gap, where snapshot-based restores are too slow and too blunt
- A visibility gap, where teams don’t know what’s protected, or what isn’t
- A tooling gap, where backup processes are stitched together across clouds and scripts
- A value gap, where backup data sits idle instead of supporting analytics or audits
- And most critically, a confidence gap: teams simply can’t trust backups to work when it matters
The rest of this post breaks down how leading teams are closing each of these gaps with posture-aware strategies.
1. Why Don’t Teams Trust Their Backups? (The Confidence Gap)
Backups are supposed to be the safety net. But when a real recovery is needed, they too often become the weakest link.
While many teams still rely on static snapshots and stitched-together tools, others are shifting toward continuous posture management, granular recovery, and queryable storage. These teams aren’t just improving recovery times. They’re reframing backup as part of their active infrastructure, not just a last-resort safeguard.
39% of organizations said they’ve either lost cloud data or don’t trust that their backups are secure. Sixty-four percent of incidents were attributed to human error. Only 21% felt confident in the cost efficiency of their current setup.
Leading teams close this gap by adopting a continuous posture management, granular recovery, and queryable storage approach. Backups shift from last-resort insurance to an active part of cloud infrastructure.
2. Why Are Restores So Slow and Expensive? (The Recovery Gap)
When confidence is low, most teams default to over-restoring.
Snapshot-based recovery, especially for Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon EKS, often means pulling massive amounts of data just to find one object. It’s slow, expensive, and disruptively broad.
Teams with stronger posture, especially those trying to cut AWS S3 costs, are taking a different approach: granular recovery. By understanding the structure of what’s backed up and classifying it in real time, they can recover exactly what’s needed—nothing more, nothing less. That means lower RTOs, fewer resource drains, and faster business continuity.
This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between meeting recovery objectives and missing them entirely.
3. What’s Hiding in Your Backups? (The Visibility Gap)
Even in cloud-forward environments, backup coverage is often uneven or unclear. Without automated classification and posture scoring, teams are left guessing what’s protected and where gaps might be hiding.
54% of respondents cited compliance or security risks caused by mismanaged backup data as their top concern.
The fix is real-time posture awareness. This means continuously detecting what’s unprotected, surfacing misconfigurations, and automatically enforcing policy coverage.
4. Are Too Many Tools Making Backups Harder? (The Tooling Gap)
Fragmentation is still the norm. Many teams rely on the native DR tools provided by cloud providers, brittle scripts, or third-party systems that don’t talk to each other.
The result is complexity: inconsistent policies, conflicting schedules, broken automations.
51% of organizations still rely on manual or semi-automated processes, and 21% juggle multiple backup tools.
How leading teams close this gap: They consolidate onto a single posture-aware, cloud-native platform that:
- Works across environments
- Enforces consistent policies
- Scales with infrastructure changes
5. Are Your Backups Doing Anything for the Business? (The Value Gap)
One of the biggest shifts in backup isn’t about protection—it’s about potential.
Backups represent the largest historical dataset that many organizations have. But for most, they’re inaccessible: stored in cold vaults, spread across formats, and siloed from the rest of the data strategy. That’s changing.
81% of survey respondents said they see value in transforming backups into a queryable data lake, and 16% said AI and analytics are now driving their backup investments.
Leading teams are restructuring backups into queryable data lakes, unlocking value for:
- Audits and compliance
- Testing and analytics
- AI model training
How Leading Teams Are Closing the Gaps
Organizations closing the confidence gap aren’t just modernizing tooling. They’re treating backup like any other strategic system: governed, observable, and adaptable.
They’re:
- Replacing manual tagging with real-time classification
- Enforcing posture dynamically across multi-cloud environments
- Recovering selectively without over-restore delays
- Making backup data queryable for audits, compliance, and analytics
- Using posture scoring and behavioral indicators to surface risks early
In short, backup is no longer a static infrastructure. It’s a posture to manage, improve, and measure just like cost, security, or performance.
What Comes Next: From DR to Data Intelligence
As cloud environments become more distributed, fast-moving, and AI-connected, backups will continue to evolve—from a protection layer to an intelligence layer.
Cloud Backup Posture Management (CBPM) is emerging as the model for that shift: a way to ensure readiness, enable rapid recovery, and activate backup data across the organization.
Read the complete 2025 State of Cloud Backup Report to see where teams are succeeding and where most still fall short.
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