NAKIVO: Closing the Gap Between Backup and Recovery
In cybersecurity, there are certain assumptions that refuse to die.
One of the most persistent is the belief that if an organization has backups, it is automatically protected. It sounds reasonable enough. Data is backed up, copies exist in multiple locations, and the compliance boxes are checked. Problem solved.
Except it isn’t.
As ransomware attacks continue to evolve and recovery expectations tighten, many organizations are discovering an uncomfortable truth: backup and recovery are not the same thing. In fact, the gap between the two has become one of the most significant operational risks facing modern enterprises.
That realization sits at the heart of NAKIVO’s mission.
Founded in 2012, NAKIVO has built its reputation by focusing on a problem many vendors historically treated as secondary. While much of the market concentrated on storing backups, NAKIVO focused on ensuring organizations could actually recover when disaster strikes.
“When we started in 2012, the problem was virtualization outrunning the tools built to protect it,” said Sergiy Serdyuk, VP of Product Management at NAKIVO. “That problem never went away. It just changed shape.”
Over the past decade, environments have become increasingly complex. Virtual infrastructure expanded into hybrid cloud deployments. SaaS applications became business critical. Remote work transformed enterprise architectures. Meanwhile, attackers became faster, more automated, and more aggressive.
According to Serdyuk, the industry’s challenge is no longer simply protecting data. It is ensuring organizations can restore operations quickly when something inevitably goes wrong.
“What we kept seeing was a gap nobody wanted to talk about,” Serdyuk explained. “The gap between having backups and being able to recover from them.”
That distinction matters more today than ever before.
Organizations may have backup repositories, offsite storage, replication strategies, and carefully documented recovery plans. Yet many still find themselves paying ransoms or enduring days of downtime because recovery processes fail under real-world pressure.
“Our job is to close that gap,” Sergiy said. “From the beginning, our focus has been operational recoverability, not backup storage.”
That philosophy has shaped the company’s product strategy from the start.
Today, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides protection for virtual, physical, cloud, NAS, SaaS, and Microsoft 365 environments through a unified platform. The goal is straightforward: reduce operational complexity while increasing confidence that recovery will actually work when it matters most.
As Serdyuk puts it, “Recovery isn’t a feature of a backup solution. It’s the entire point.”
The Industry’s Backup Illusion
Ask most CISOs if their organization is prepared for a ransomware attack and many will point to backup systems as evidence of readiness.
The problem, Serdyuk argues, is that successful backups often create a false sense of security.
“The biggest misconception is, ‘If we have backups, we can recover from anything,’” he said.
A backup completion report only proves one thing: data was written somewhere successfully.
It says nothing about whether the data can be restored quickly. It says nothing about whether recovery objectives can be met. It says nothing about whether the backup itself is clean, accessible, or free from compromise.
“As we say at NAKIVO, untested backup is a fire extinguisher still sealed in the box,” Serdyuk noted. “Technically present, operationally unproven.”
It is an analogy that resonates because nearly every security leader has experienced some version of this reality.
Recovery plans often look elegant in PowerPoint presentations. Recovery tests are frequently postponed because operational priorities seem more urgent. Documentation grows stale. Personnel changes occur. Infrastructure evolves.
Then an incident happens.
Suddenly the organization discovers that theoretical recovery and practical recovery are very different things.
“Recovery under pressure exposes every weakness,” Serdyuk said. “Recovery plans that look sound on paper can be nearly impossible to execute in a real incident.”
The challenge becomes even more complicated when attackers specifically target backup infrastructure.
Many organizations still assume that backups stored offsite or in the cloud are somehow beyond the reach of ransomware operators.
That assumption is increasingly dangerous.
“Backup repositories are no longer secondary targets,” Serdyuk explained. “They are often primary targets. Attackers understand that a victim with clean, reachable backups doesn’t pay.”
The reality is simple. Attackers follow access paths, not geography.
Whether infrastructure resides on-premises, in the cloud, or in a remote facility matters less than whether attackers can reach it.
That shift has elevated technologies such as immutability, air-gapping, encryption, backup verification, and recovery testing from advanced features to operational necessities.
Simplifying Complexity
The backup and recovery market has no shortage of vendors promising comprehensive protection.
What it does have, according to Serdyuk, is a growing complexity problem.
“Many established tools have grown so complex you practically need a flowchart to operate them,” he said.
Anyone who has spent time navigating multiple management consoles, licensing tiers, add-on modules, and overlapping recovery workflows knows exactly what he means.
The irony is difficult to miss. Solutions designed to reduce risk often introduce their own operational risk through excessive complexity.
“We treat simplicity as a security control, not a convenience,” Serdyuk said.
That statement reflects a broader trend occurring throughout cybersecurity. Increasingly, security leaders recognize that complexity itself creates vulnerabilities.
Every additional interface introduces potential misconfigurations. Every manual process creates opportunities for human error. Every disconnected tool adds friction during incident response.
The challenge becomes particularly acute during recovery events when teams are tired, stressed, and operating under intense pressure.
As Serdyuk points out, simplicity becomes more valuable when everything else is falling apart.
NAKIVO’s approach centers on consolidating protection for virtual machines, physical systems, cloud workloads, NAS environments, Microsoft 365, and multiple hypervisors within a single platform.
The objective is not merely convenience. It is operational resilience.
Organizations increasingly lack the budget, staffing, and patience required to manage sprawling backup ecosystems built from multiple disconnected products.
“Customers want enterprise-grade backup, recovery, ransomware protection and disaster recovery without building a massive, overengineered environment around it,” Serdyuk said.
Recovery Expectations Are Changing
If there is one trend NAKIVO sees consistently across its customer base, it is shrinking recovery windows.
“A few years ago, a multi-day recovery was painful but acceptable,” Serdyuk explained. “Now, boards want recovery measured in hours and they want evidence, not assurances.”
That change reflects the growing business impact of downtime.
For healthcare providers, manufacturing operations, financial institutions, educational organizations, and government agencies, extended outages can quickly become existential events.
These industries represent some of NAKIVO’s fastest-growing customer segments precisely because downtime costs continue to rise.
“The most urgency comes from organizations that feel downtime immediately and can’t absorb it,” Serdyuk noted.
The shift is also changing the questions CISOs ask.
Historically, organizations focused on whether systems were being backed up.
Today, more mature organizations are asking different questions.
“Have we tested recovery and how long did it actually take?” Serdyuk said. “That’s the right question.”
Those questions naturally lead to greater interest in recovery automation and orchestration.
Manual recovery processes may function adequately during small incidents. They become bottlenecks during large-scale disruptions involving dozens or hundreds of systems.
As a result, organizations increasingly seek technologies capable of automating critical recovery workflows while reducing dependence on human intervention.
AI’s Role in Recovery
Few technology conversations today avoid AI for very long.
Backup and recovery are no exception.
Fortunately, NAKIVO appears to approach the topic with a level of pragmatism that is sometimes missing from vendor marketing.
“We’ve been building automated intelligence into our solution long before AI became a buzzword,” Serdyuk said.
That includes automated backup verification, intelligent scheduling, policy-based orchestration, and workflow automation designed to reduce human error.
The emphasis remains on operational outcomes rather than marketing headlines.
“People make mistakes during incidents,” Sergiy explained. “They restore in the wrong order, miss a dependency or reintroduce malware.”
Automation helps transform fragile, manual processes into repeatable and testable workflows.
At the same time, Serdyuk is careful not to overstate AI’s capabilities.
“AI is a tool, not a substitute for sound architecture,” he said.
That perspective will likely resonate with experienced CISOs who have endured several generations of technology hype cycles.
AI may help organizations identify risks faster, detect unusual activity, optimize recovery processes, and reduce administrative overhead. But ultimately, resilience still depends on architecture, planning, testing, and execution.
Technology can accelerate recovery. It cannot replace discipline.
Lessons From the Front Lines
Perhaps the most valuable insights emerge from actual recovery events.
According to Serdyuk, one lesson appears repeatedly across customer environments.
“Simplicity matters far more during a crisis than many realize.”
Recovery plans that seem manageable during routine operations often become surprisingly difficult to execute under pressure.
Another recurring lesson involves testing.
Organizations that regularly validate recovery workflows consistently recover faster and demonstrate greater confidence during incidents.
The pattern is remarkably consistent.
Teams that practice recovery improve recovery.
Teams that assume recovery will work often discover otherwise at the worst possible moment.
NAKIVO has also learned that no single technology can deliver true ransomware resilience.
“Organizations need multiple safeguards,” Serdyuk said, pointing to immutability, isolation, encryption, verification, and orchestrated recovery workflows as critical components of a resilient strategy.
In other words, cyber resilience remains a layered discipline.
There is still no magic button.
Looking Ahead
As cyber threats continue evolving, Serdyuk believes the greatest challenge may be what he calls the “asymmetry of speed.”
“The time between initial compromise and full encryption keeps shrinking,” he said.
Attackers increasingly leverage automation, AI-assisted reconnaissance, and automated lateral movement techniques to accelerate operations.
Meanwhile, recovery often remains a human-paced activity.
“If attacks keep accelerating and recovery doesn’t, that gap becomes the whole story,” Serdyuk warned.
It is a sobering observation and one that highlights why organizations can no longer treat recovery as an afterthought.
The future of cyber resilience may depend less on preventing every attack and more on ensuring organizations can recover faster than attackers can cause damage.
For NAKIVO, that mission continues to guide product development.
Customers can expect continued investment in ransomware resilience, broader workload coverage, automation, and faster recovery capabilities over the coming years.
For CISOs evaluating backup and recovery solutions, the takeaway is straightforward.
Do not simply ask whether backups exist.
Ask whether recovery has been tested.
Ask how quickly critical systems can be restored.
Ask whether backup infrastructure itself can withstand modern ransomware attacks.
Most importantly, verify the answers before an incident forces the issue.
As Serdyuk repeatedly emphasized throughout our conversation, recovery readiness is no longer a secondary consideration. It is the foundation of cyber resilience.
CISOs interested in evaluating NAKIVO should consider downloading a trial version, testing recovery workflows against real workloads, and validating whether the platform’s approach to simplicity, automation, and recovery assurance aligns with their operational requirements.
For more information, please visit www.nakivo.com.
About the Author
Pete Green is the CISO / CTO of Anvil Works, a ProCloud SaaS company and co-author of “The vCISO Playbook: How Virtual CISOs Deliver Enterprise-Grade Cybersecurity to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs)”. With over 25 years of experience in information technology and cybersecurity, Pete is a seasoned and accomplished security practitioner.
Throughout his career, he has held a wide range of technical and leadership roles, including LAN/WLAN Engineer, Threat Analyst, Security Project Manager, Security Architect, Cloud Security Architect, Principal Security Consultant, Director of IT, CTO, CEO, Virtual CISO, and CISO.
Pete has supported clients across numerous industries, including federal, state, and local government, as well as financial services, healthcare, food services, manufacturing, technology, transportation, and hospitality.
He holds a Master of Computer Information Systems in Information Security from Boston University, which is recognized as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance / Cyber Defense (CAE IA/CD) by the NSA and DHS. He also holds a Master of Business Administration in Informatics.
