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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:

1. Can your backups actually be recovered?
2. Can they be recovered inside your RPOs and RTOs?
3. 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.

Over the past few years, several leading backup vendors have popularised the idea of the Cloud Clean Room.

On paper, it’s compelling.

You spin up an isolated environment in the cloud. The provider handles the infrastructure. You bring in your backup data, start analysing it, and try to figure out what’s clean and what’s compromised.

It’s fast to deploy. Convenient. And when you’re in the middle of an incident, that simplicity matters.

But there’s a catch, actually there are a few.

First, your data has to be in the cloud. If it isn’t already, you’re now dealing with transfer times, bandwidth constraints, and inevitably cost. Egress charges alone can turn a bad day into an expensive one.

Second, these environments are fundamentally reactive. They’re built for after the attack. A forensic lab to investigate what happened and piece together a recovery plan.

And third, they tend to be vendor-specific. If your world includes multiple backup platforms or even primary storage snapshots, you may find yourself limited. One clean room, one ecosystem.

Convenient? Yes. Flexible? Not always.

A different approach: the on-prem (and everywhere) Clean Room

Now flip the perspective.

What if the clean room wasn’t something you scrambled to build after an incident…
but something you were already using before one?

That’s the idea behind the Predatar CleanRoom^TM.

Instead of being tied to a single cloud or vendor, it’s deployable anywhere, on-prem, in a colo, or in the cloud. It arrives as a simple OVA and plugs into a wide range of backup and storage platforms.

But the real shift isn’t where it runs. It’s how it’s used.

This is a proactive clean room.

Rather than waiting for an attack, it continuously tests your ability to recover. Not just “does the backup exist?”, but “can I restore this data quickly, cleanly, and completely?”

That’s Recovery Assurance.

And it changes the conversation.

Proof, not promises

Most backup vendors will tell you your data is safe.

Predatar takes a different stance: Prove it.

Because it’s vendor-agnostic, it’s not marking its own homework. It’s independently validating whether your recovery actually works across all your backup tools, not just one.

There’s also an unexpected side effect.

When you’re testing recovery daily, you start to see things.

Dormant threats. Hidden artifacts. Things that slipped past production security tools.

At the time of writing, 93% of Predatar customers have discovered malware in their backups, including ransomware payloads, ransomware notes, and spyware that went undetected elsewhere.

That’s not just recovery testing. That’s early warning.

So, which is better?

It’s not a simple “this vs that.”

Cloud Clean Rooms are fast, accessible, and useful in the heat of an incident. They give you a place to investigate when things have already gone wrong.

But they’re reactive, tied to specific vendors, and dependent on cloud data logistics.

Predatar’s CleanRoom^TM, on the other hand, is about readiness.
It’s flexible, vendor-agnostic, and designed to answer a big question before disaster strikes…

“Can we recover – right now – without surprises?”

The real takeaway

In a ransomware event, time is everything.

Cloud Clean Rooms help you respond.
Proactive Clean Rooms help you not panic in the first place.

And if you can walk into that 2:17am moment already knowing your data is clean and recoverable?

That’s not just resilience.
That’s true Recovery Assurance.

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In July 2024, we asked a provocative question: Will AI replace the backup administrator? Read the original blog here.

At the time, Predatar had just released R16 Orca, and “Generative AI” was the phrase on everyone’s lips. “Agentic AI”– systems capable of autonomous, goal-driven action – was not yet part of mainstream thinking, at least not in the wider public domain. It wasn’t until later in 2024 that agentic AI began to enter the broader discourse. Since then, the conversation, and the tech, has moved at a blistering pace.

Our original conclusion still stands: the backup administrator is here to stay. But the nature of the role is changing far more dramatically than we anticipated. With the emergence of agentic AI, we are moving beyond assistance into true autonomy in backup and recovery operations.

So, what’s now possible? Agentic AI opens the door to capabilities such as automatically scheduling and optimizing backups based on real-time conditions, dynamically building and fine-tuning recovery plans, and intelligently orchestrating the order of restores to achieve the fastest recovery outcomes. It can also respond in real time to AI-driven anomaly detection, adjusting protection strategies or initiating defensive actions as threats emerge.

While it is possible to build these capabilities into operational management platforms, it’s still early days. The industry is just beginning to explore what fully autonomous data protection looks like, and it will be some time before these systems reach full maturity. We predict that until 2028, the model will be “human-on-the-loop”. The backup administrator role will remain as important as ever, perhaps even more so. From 2028 onwards, the role will evolve. The human backup administrator will take on more of an AI governance role. This is often described as “human-before-the-loop”, where the backup admin provides the initial guardrails that allow AI to act independently.

The threat landscape is accelerating. Backup vendors know this and are scrambling to catch up. They face a new kind of arms race against AI-enabled threat actors who are actively disrupting the ability to recover. This is no longer just about encryption or threat detection. It’s about proving resilience.

The response is clear: we must fight fire with fire. Embracing agentic AI within cyber resilience platforms is the only viable path to keep pace.

At Predatar, this shift is already well underway. We have made a decisive, seismic move to re-engineer our entire platform – spanning monitoring, automation, recovery assurance, and CleanRoom capabilities – around agentic AI. This is not a feature enhancement; it is a fundamental redesign.

Will we see a day when agents are truly autonomous, and the backup admin is fully “human-out-of-the-loop”? We’re not prepared to say. We are good, but not that good.

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By Rick Norgate, CEO, Predatar.

I spend a lot of my time talking to vendors, partners and customers across the storage, security and business continuity ecosystems. Different roles, different priorities, but the same conversation keeps coming up. At some point, Clean Rooms enter the discussion and almost without fail I hear a version of the same response… “We love the idea… but Clean Rooms are expensive.”

Not All Clean Rooms Are Created Equal

Not only is the perception not universally true, but there’s another layer to it as well. Ask ten people what a “Clean Room” is and you’ll get ten different answers. For some it’s about detection, for others it’s isolation, or a last resort recovery space. The reality is not all Clean Rooms are equal, and a lot of the confusion in the market comes from that.

The Industry Created This Problem

To be fair, the perception around cost didn’t come from nowhere. The industry has, over time, shaped it. The industry has tied Clean Rooms to heavy, hardware led approaches, large deployments, dedicated infrastructure and significant upfront investment before you see any value.

Traditional solutions such as the Dell Cyber Recovery Vault is a good example of where that thinking comes from. They are built around sizeable hardware estates and focus on encryption detection at scale, identifying when ransomware has started encrypting data. That has real value, but it also tells you something important. By the time you are detecting encryption, the attack is already in motion. You are reacting, not proving anything and you have likely already invested heavily just to get there.

Costs Are Making It Worse

Fast forward to 2026 and the situation is getting tougher. Hardware costs have jumped significantly, with increases of up to 50% not uncommon. So the mental equation becomes even harder to justify. People see Clean Rooms as valuable, but expensive, complex, and something to come back to later.

But that is not what a Clean Room should be.

The Only Question That Matters

When I speak to customers, especially security and business continuity teams, very few are asking for better detection tools. What they really want to know is much simpler.

“If we get hit, can we recover? Not in theory, not based on a report, but for real. Can we recover quickly, cleanly, and completely?”

That is the problem that matters, and it is the problem we set out to solve with Predatar CleanRoom^TM, our Isolated Recovery Environment.

Proving Recovery Changes Everything

Instead of waiting for something bad to happen, the Predatar approach is to continuously prove that recovery works. We automatically recover backups and primary snapshots into isolation, test whether those systems come back clean and usable and scan for malware as part of that process. You do not need any manual effort to kick this off. We run fully automated restore testing at scale across both primary and secondary data and we do it in a completely vendor agnostic way.

That combination matters. It means you are not tied to a single backup platform or storage vendor, and you are not relying on periodic, manual testing that may or may not happen. You are continuously validating your ability to recover across your actual estate.

What You Find When You Actually Test

And when organisations start doing this properly, something interesting happens. They do not just gain confidence in recovery, they uncover risks they did not know existed. Dormant malware, planted threats, things that have not triggered yet but would have eventually. Across our customer base, 93% have found malware sitting in their backups. These are not organisations in the middle of an attack. These are organisations doing the right thing, testing and validating and still finding hidden exposure.

Why Cost Still Dominates the Conversation

So why does cost still dominate the conversation? Because most people still believe Clean Rooms require a huge upfront commitment. Big hardware, big rollout, big decision. And when something feels that significant, it gets delayed. I see it all the time, projects pushed into next year, endless scoping exercises, teams waiting for the right moment. But resilience doesn’t work like that. You do not get to choose when you need it.

A Clean Room Without the Hardware Burden

This is exactly why we took a different approach with Predatar. We deliver the Predatar CleanRoom as a virtual appliance. You can deploy it into your existing environment, whether that is your virtual platform, repurposed hardware or simply spare capacity you already have. In fact, over 70% of our customers deploy using resources they already own, with no new hardware investment required. What used to be a capital heavy decision becomes an operational one, and that changes how organisations approach it.

Start Small and Scale When You’re Ready

Many teams assume that if they adopt a Clean Room, they have to do everything at once. In reality, the most successful organisations start small. They focus on what matters most, a minimum viable business service, a critical application, or a subset of their environment such as key VMware workloads. They prove recovery there first and then expand over time. There is no need for a big bang rollout or an all in commitment from day one.

One View Across a Fragmented Estate

Another challenge many organisations face is fragmentation. Multiple backup platforms, multiple storage systems, and multiple tools all trying to answer the same question in slightly different ways. Can we recover? Predatar works across backups and primary snapshots, across vendors and platforms, to give you a single, consistent view of recovery confidence.

The Real Barrier Isn’t Technology

If there is one thing I have learned from these conversations, it is this: perception, not technology, is the biggest barrier to adopting Clean Rooms. If people believe they are expensive, complex, and hardware-heavy, they will keep putting them off. But when we redefine them as something lightweight, flexible, and focused on proving recovery, the conversation changes very quickly.

It All Comes Down to One Question

Because in the end, resilience is not about how fast you detect a problem. It is about what happens next. Can you recover quickly, cleanly, and completely?

That is the only question that really matters, and it is one the industry needs to get better at answering.

If you are having the same conversations and want to challenge the assumptions around Clean Rooms, we would welcome the discussion. Drop us a line.

If you’re a risk or compliance officer – or, in fact, anyone with a role to play in ensuring operational resilience in your organization – how do you know that the backup platforms your IT team is using are up to the task?

It’s an important question. The answer – when you think about it – is worrying.

Because typically, organizations like yours rely on the resiliency credentials that the technology vendors themselves set out. Is it any wonder that every backup vendor claims that their platform is the most resilient, when they are setting their own criteria to measure resilience?

Of course, you could ask your IT or infrastructure team – they are the experts, after all. But the brutal truth is that resilience isn’t their top priority. These teams are typically overstretched and under-resourced. Making sure that the systems and data your organization runs on every day are available under normal conditions keeps them busy enough.

Understandably, they will have a preference for the infrastructure products that make everyday management and administration easy. And, in fact, it goes beyond day-to-day practicalities. If you spend enough time with storage teams, you’ll notice that people often become deeply attached to certain vendors, defending them almost like a belief system rather than just a technology choice.

Understanding the true picture of resilience in your business becomes even more complicated when you have a large and complex infrastructure environment. An environment made up of technologies from multiple vendors – each with its own claims, its own standards, and its own devoted followers inside your business.

The idea of ‘devoted followers’ brings an interesting concept to mind – one which history has shown to be a good one: the separation of church and state. Not only has this approach been useful for monarchs who have found themselves inconveniently married, but more importantly, it has been invaluable for managing kingdoms. And, believe it or not, the concept is relevant here.

In this analogy, vendors like Dell, IBM, Pure, Veeam, Rubrik, etc are the ‘churches,’ each with its own doctrine. Useful, certainly – but not neutral.

What is needed is a ‘state’: a vendor-independent authority that sits above the fray, governing consistently across all systems. One that ensures recovery testing is meaningful, malware scanning is credible, and resilience is measured the same way everywhere.

This separation reduces conflicts of interest, standardises outcomes, and brings a much-needed layer of objectivity to an otherwise fragmented landscape.

No analogy is perfect, of course. Vendors aren’t religions, and governance platforms don’t wield civil authority, but the underlying principle still holds: resilience shouldn’t be defined by the tools themselves. Because if it is, don’t be surprised if everything looks perfect… until it really matters… and then it isn’t.

Discover Independent Recovery Assurance

Visit www.predatar.com to start your journey to independent Recovery Assurance or contact hello@predatar.com for expert advice from the leading independent Recovery Assurance experts at Predatar.

R18.2 reinforces Predatar’s core mission to deliver proof. Proof that your backups recover quickly, cleanly, and completely across your entire estate. Not just within a single backup product, but across primary storage and multiple backup platforms working together to restore real business services when it matters most.

This release adds support for NovaStor Backup, the latest addition to Predatar’s growing ecosystem of supported vendors. With this integration, teams can orchestrate recovery testing end-to-end, validating not just individual restores, but true recovery by bringing together data from multiple sources to fully re-establish services.

The Predatar Cleanroom scans recovered data for malware in an isolated environment, helping ensure it is safe, compliant, and ready for use. Governance reporting delivers clear, auditable insight into every test, giving organisations the confidence to demonstrate resilience across their entire data landscape.

NovaStor joins a broad and growing set of supported platforms, including Cohesity, IBM Storage Protect, IBM Storage Protect+, IBM Data Protect, Rubrik, Veeam, Zerto, Pure Storage, and IBM FlashSystem, so you can prove recovery across the technologies that underpin your business.

Stefan Utzinger, CEO of NovaStor, commented:

“NovaStor customers can now extend their data protection strategy with automated recovery testing and cleanroom validation. Together with Predatar, they gain the assurance that their backups don’t just exist, they are proven to recover in a way that supports real business continuity.”

At its core, Predatar goes beyond restore. It proves recovery.

To learn more about Recovery Assurance for NovaStor backups, see the latest release information on the Predatar website.

5 Signs That Your Disaster Recovery Testing is Prehistoric.

Let’s be honest. In most businesses, Disaster Recovery (DR) testing still looks suspiciously like it did 20 years ago. Runbooks, war room, late night pizza delivery, a colossal spreadsheet for tracking the whole thing.

If that sounds familiar, it’s time to face up to the truth. Your outdated DR tests are putting your business continuity at serious risk. The woolly mammoth in the room is this… the world has changed and your processes are no longer fit-for-purpose.

Here are 5 warning signs that your DR testing approach is stuck in the past – and some practical advice to bring it into the 21st century.

#1. You test once or twice a year.

Traditional DR testing was designed around big, periodic exercises. Typically, annually or quarterly. Everyone gathers, the scripts come out, systems get failed over, and someone ticks the box.

Job done.

The problem here is that the data that your business runs on is changing every single day. New user profiles, software updates, hardware refreshes, security patches. Any of these can knock a restore off track and potentially derail the recovery of important services or applications that your business relies on. 

Your environment will change hundreds, if not thousands of times between DR tests. Just because a system was recoverable yesterday, it doesn’t mean that it will be today.

Resilience shouldn’t be something you check from time to time. It should be continuously validated as part of the everyday operations of your business.

#2. Your DR test relies on heroic manual effort

The people that manage the data in your business are unsung heroes. They quietly keep your organization running – every day. But, if your DR tests require dozens of these heroes to assemble, and follow a 200-page runbook into the early hours – that’s not resilience – that’s a liability.

Manual recovery processes are:

• Slow
• Prone to human error
• Inconsistent
• Impossible to scale

In a real-world data outage, when the pressure is high, and time matters – the last thing you want is a room full of people following a big, complicated document.

Modern recovery needs automation, orchestration, and repeatability.

#3. Your DR tests are designed for hardware failures — not cyberattacks

The most likely type of disaster to hit your business isn’t an earthquake, a flood, or a fire. It’s a cyberattack.

You know it. Your IT team knows it. The Business Continuity team know it. Even the executives know it – But few dare to ask the question, “Does our DR testing simulate cyber recovery scenarios?”

Ransomware doesn’t politely failover your servers. Attackers move laterally across systems. They lock-out administrators. They Infect backups. They encrypt your data. Most DR testing rarely replicates this reality. Instead, it tests a clean failover scenario where everything behaves exactly as expected. It’s just not how cyber incidents unfold.

Modern DR testing must validate whether you can recover clean, trusted data and restore operations after a cyberattack – not just after a hardware failure.

#4. Your DR tests prove compliance, not recovery.

Let’s be blunt: Most DR testing exists primarily to satisfy auditors.

• A report gets generated.
• Boxes get ticked.
• Someone signs it off.
• Everyone gets back to the day job.

But compliance reports don’t restore systems. What matters is whether you can recover quickly, recover cleanly and recover completely.

If your DR testing produces documentation but not real operational confidence, you’ve got a reporting exercise, not a resilience strategy.

#5. You don’t actually know if your recovery plan works

This might be the most dangerous problem of all.

Many organisations assume their DR plan works because it worked the last time they tested it.

But if testing is:

• Infrequent
• Highly manual
• Limited in scope

…then what you really have is a lot of hope and not much proof.

That’s a risky place to be.

Bring your business continuity into the modern world

Modern recovery testing needs to move beyond periodic testing and manual exercises.

It should be:

• Automated — removing reliance on manual runbooks and risk of human error
• Continuous — validating recovery readiness regularly, not annually
• Realistic — simulating modern threats, including cyber incidents
• Actionable — giving teams real insight into recovery performance

This is exactly the shift Predatar was built to enable. Predatar orchestrates Recovery Assurance testing across complex enterprise environments, allowing you to automate recovery workflows, run low-impact recovery test, identify issues early, and prove recovery readiness with confidence.

Make sure your recovery processes actually work — not just on paper, but in practice.

Learn how to reduce your reliance on outdated DR tests and bring your DR testing into the modern world. Read our Recovery Assurance Buyers Guide or visit predatar.com

Many organizations treat cybersecurity and cyber resilience as interchangeable ideas. They’re not. In fact, confusing the two remains one of the biggest reasons businesses stay exposed even after investing heavily in protection.

Prevention is Only Half the Story

Cybersecurity focuses on prevention. It’s the locks on the doors, the alarm systems, the CCTV. Firewalls, endpoint detection, and identity controls all work to stop an attack in the first place. And to be fair, the industry has made huge strides here. Thanks to AI, threat detection now works faster and responds smarter. Vendors, especially in backup and storage, have worked hard to embed threat detection directly into their platforms. The result? Your data is better protected than ever.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth. Protection will never be infallible.

Unlike cybersecurity, cyber resilience focuses on recovery. It answers a fundamentally different question: When something gets through your defenses, how quickly and confidently can you get back to normal? It’s an important question that every organization needs to face, because breaches no longer sit at the edge of possibility. They happen regularly.

This is where a critical gap emerges, and it revolves around one word. PROOF.

Confidence Without Evidence

Most organizations assume they can recover because they have backups. But assumption is not proof. Storing data somewhere does not guarantee it remains clean, complete, or recoverable within the time the business actually needs. In a real incident, reality tests those assumptions brutally – and they often fail.

Technology vendors will tell you their platforms can detect ransomware, flag anomalies, or protect backup integrity. And many do this extremely well. But very few can answer the question that really matters to the business:

“Can you prove we can recover?”

Proof means more than dashboards and alerts. It means you can demonstrate, repeat, and validate that systems, applications, and data restore at speed, at scale, and in line with business requirements. It means testing recovery, not just hoping it works.

The challenge becomes even more complex in real-world environments. Most organizations don’t run a single, neatly packaged backup solution. They use multiple backup products, different storage platforms, and often span on premises and cloud environments. Each of these systems may include its own threat detection capabilities, its own reporting, and its own version of “protection.” But none of them provide a unified view of recovery.

So while multiple tools may tell you everything is “secure,” none give you coordinated proof that the business can recover. Can your critical applications come back online together? Do your plans account for dependencies? Can you actually use the recovered data? These cross-platform questions become incredibly difficult to answer when everything sits in silos.

This defines cyber resilience maturity: moving from confidence based on assumption to confidence backed by evidence.

From Protection to Proof

Organizations need to shift their thinking. Security is absolutely vital and is the right place to start, but it’s only half the story. Resilience backed by proof ultimately protects the business. When an attack happens, the winners aren’t the ones who thought they were secure. They’re the ones who can prove they can recover.

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Want to move from assumption to proof? Predatar helps organizations validate and orchestrate recovery across complex environments, giving you clear, continuous evidence that your business can recover when it matters most. If you’re ready to turn resilience into something you can actually prove, it’s time to take a closer look.

R18.1 Black Widow is now live – introducing a significantly enhanced user interface for one of Predatar’s most-used features… And this is just the beginning!

The headline news in our last major release, R18 Black Widow, was support for Zerto workloads. This means that Zerto customers can benefit from Predatar’s unique Recovery Assurance capabilities. But that’s only part of the Black Widow story.

Behind the scenes, our development team laid the groundwork in R18.0 for a big evolution of the Predatar GUI (Graphic User Interface).

As Predatar CEO, Rick Norgate explains: “Over the coming months, Predatar users will see an exciting evolution of the platform. Moving forward, Predatar will not only look more modern and polished, but – importantly – it will become more intuitive and easier to use.”

While there’s no doubt the new direction for the GUI looks great, the changes are far more than cosmetic. At their core is a UX/UI framework designed to make Predatar more intuitive and boost productivity for users.

For Predatar customers the journey begins today, with the launch of R18.1 Black Widow. This new release includes a dramatically enhanced Data Explorer interface. Not only will users notice the impactful new look – setting the tone for future GUI enhancements – they’ll also find that Data Explorer is simpler, clearer, and more efficient to use.

Filter Faster.

Feedback from customers told us that the filters and display options in Data Explorer felt overwhelming. Backend analytics supported this – showing that roughly half of the available options were rarely, if ever, used.

Previously, there were more than 20 ways to filter data and 4 different ways to visualise the results. We’ve reduced the options by around 50%. Now, there is a more streamlined control panel highlighting just three filters that our users utilise time and time again, with a further 7 ‘advanced’ filters just a click away. The ones that no one was using? They’ve gone!

We’ve also removed the ‘scatter’ and ‘graph’ view options. While they were cool features, they simply weren’t adding practical value – so they’ve gone too. By focusing on the tools our users actually rely on, we’ve decluttered the interface, making it easier and faster to get to the answers you need. It’s also created more space for the data ’tiles’ themselves. And those have been enhanced too…

More insights. Fewer Clicks.

Users will immediately notice the evolution of the Data Explorer tiles. They now surface far more of the information you need — without requiring multiple clicks. Previously, users would regularly have to drill into individual nodes to get important information. Now, essential detail are visible at a glance, including backup platform, workload type, storage size, and resilience fundamentals, and anomaly count.

The result? Clearer analysis. Reduced friction. Faster decision-making.

Accessibility Matters.

Improving accessibility is a key objective in the evolution of the Predatar GUI. Data Explorer, with its need to communicate dense information in a compact space, presented a particular challenge.

The previous interface relied heavily on colour — using a traffic light system to indicate node health. While effective for many users, this approach could create barriers, particularly for those with colour vision deficiencies.

The new design still uses a traffic light model, but colour is no longer the primary signal. Health grades, anomaly counts, and recovery indicators are now clearly displayed as text and structured data — ensuring users can understand node status without relying solely on colour.

In addition, Predatar continues to offer both dark and light display modes, so you can choose the right visual settings for you and your environment.

Accessibility isn’t an afterthought — it’s becoming foundational to the Predatar experience.

What’s next?

This is just the start. The Predatar team will continue to enhance the user experience. With each update, the platform will become more powerful, more intuitive and easier to navigate.

To be among the first to hear about upcoming releases. Follow Predatar on LinkedIn, or join our mailing list for updates delivered straight to your inbox.

As the dust particles settle on the epic finale of Stranger Things, we can’t help but see some parallels between Hawkins and a typical enterprise storage and backup environment. Bet you’ve been thinking the same thing, right?

Your Hawkins

The world that everyone interacts with, every day. The data your employees rely on lives here, the applications they use are run from here, the systems your customers use to access your products and services are here too. Your production storage is your Hawkins.

Your digital citizens go about there everyday lives, safe in the knowledge there are people and systems designed to keep things running smoothly and to make sure the world is safe. Think of business continuity teams as the local government, and your cyber security team as Hawkins Police Department.

The Upside Down

Just like the Upside Down is a mirror of Hawkins, there’s a mirror of your production data. It’s right there, just out of sight and beyond the reach of your citizens. It’s your backup environment. A constantly evolving replica of your data world.

Almost every business has an ‘Upside Down’ and if you’re lucky, yours is free from evil. But ‘lucky’ is exactly the right word – because Predatar has uncovered malware in the backups of more than 90% of its users.

The unsettling reality is that your backups are very likely to be infected. Left unchecked, just like the Mind Flayer’s tendrils, the infection will spread. Silently, turning your backup environment into a deeply dangerous world.

The Abyss

Just like the Upside Down in Stranger Things is a bridge to access – and ultimately – to destroy the real world by plunging it into the Abyss, cybercriminals are infecting your backups as a part of a bigger, more sinister plan. They want to take your entire organisation offline and make recovery impossible.

This is the Abyss – a world of chaos and total operational paralysis.

Staying away from the Abyss

Here are 3 takeaways from Stranger Things to help you keep your organisation’s ‘Hawkins’ safe, and avoid plunging into the Abyss.


Fight evil at the source
Fighting demidogs, possessed humans, Vecna, or even the Mind Flayer itself in Hawkins was never going to be enough. Just like the heroes of Stranger Things, you’ll need to get tooled-up and go hunting in the Upside Down.

Danger comes from all angles
The Mind Flayer took on many forms, but there were other threats at play too. Dr Brenner, the Russians, and the US Government all put the safety of Hawkins at risk.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that cybercrime is the only risk to your operational resilience. Untested software updates, hardware failures, human error, natural disasters, and more can put your resilience at risk.

You need super-powers
There is at least a dozen heroes in Stranger Things. Most don’t have any superhuman abilities. We love these characters, but lets be clear – Ultimate victory against the forces of evil simply wouldn’t have been possible without Eleven.

You need to get yourself some superpowers.

What next?

Become the Eleven of resilience with Predatar – Your operational resilience superpower. Predatar hunts down and eliminates signs of danger including malware and unrecoverable workloads in your backups and snapshots before they become a real world nightmare.

Watch the video to learn more, book a demo, or send us a message.