The findings users love
When Predatar uncovers malware in a customer’s backups, they are usually delighted.
Not delighted that they have malware – obviously – but delighted that it was found inside their Predatar CleanRoom before they needed those backups for real. In fact, Predatar has found malware in more than 90% of its customer’s IT environments. That statistic alone tells you something important about the reality organisations are operating in today.
And whenever malware is discovered, customers immediately understand the value. The platform has done its job. A hidden risk has been exposed – safely – in a controlled environment, before it became a genuine recovery event.
Everyone gets that instinctively.
What’s interesting is that customers don’t always react the same way when the CleanRoom uncovers restore failures or poor recovery performance, even though the value is arguably the same.
The assumption problem
The Predatar CleanRoom exists to answer three simple questions:
- Can your backups actually be recovered?
- Can they be recovered inside your RPOs and RTOs?
- Are they clean?
Most people naturally focus on the last part. Malware scanning grabs the attention when potential new customers are exploring Predatar’s capabilities – and it tends to remain the focus once the platform is live.
It’s tangible. It feels urgent. You can immediately imagine the consequences of restoring infected backups after a ransomware attack.
But operational recoverability is where many of the real problems live – and these problems are no less important.
One of the biggest misconceptions in the backup industry is the idea that because backups complete successfully, recovery will also work successfully. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t true.
A backup platform can happily report green ticks all day long, while the actual restore process tells a very different story. Recovery jobs can fail halfway through. Restore performance can collapse under load. Network bottlenecks appear. Authentication breaks. Application dependencies fail. Recovery times suddenly sit miles outside the organisation’s SLA targets.
Most businesses never see these problems because they rarely perform restores – especially not at high frequency and at scale.
Predatar does.
And when you continuously test recoverability at scale, you uncover things that would otherwise stay hidden until a real disaster.
What’s wrong with the CleanRoom?
If a restore fails inside the CleanRoom or recovery speeds are slower than expected, customers will often ask “Is something wrong with the CleanRoom?”
But the better question is usually “Is something wrong with my backup estate?” Because in almost every case, the issue isn’t the tech – The CleanRoom is simply exposing it.
It might be a problem with the backup itself. It might be storage performance, network throughput, infrastructure drift, inconsistent protection policies or application level issues inside production.
The restore told the truth.
And that truth is incredibly valuable – because the worst possible moment to discover your backups are slow, inconsistent or unrecoverable – is when your production estate is already offline.
Why the reaction is different
We’ve always found it interesting that organisations naturally celebrate malware discovery, but often react differently to failed restores. In both cases, the platform is doing the same thing. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s exposing hidden risks before they become business critical events.
The difference is emotional.
When malware is found, the platform feels like a hero.
When recoverability gaps are exposed, it can feel more personal because the findings challenge assumptions that teams have often trusted for years.
But the outcome is the same. A hidden problem was found, before a real recovery event forced the issue under pressure.
That should always be seen as a win.
The real purpose of recovery testing
The purpose of resilience testing is not to make customers feel comfortable. It’s to make sure they’re important systems are recoverable when reality gets uncomfortable.
The reality is cyber resilience isn’t about whether backups exist. It’s about whether recovery actually works when you need it most.
That means proving recoverability continuously – not assuming it.
Sometimes the process finds malware. Sometimes it finds operational weaknesses. Sometimes it finds both. All of these outcomes are valuable – because every issue discovered during testing is one less surprise during a real recovery event.
…And in a real cyber recovery scenario, surprises can be devastating.
