Having a copy of your data is a promise. Getting your business running again is the proof. They are not the same thing.

Over the Easter weekend of 2025, ransomware tore through Marks & Spencer, one of Britain’s best known retailers and an FTSE 100 company with deep resources. The break-in took a single weekend. The recovery took months. Its online store stayed shut for 46 days, shelves emptied as staff fell back on pen and paper, and the incident wiped roughly 300 million pounds, about RM1.8 billion, off the year. The lesson for every business owner is quiet but sharp: the expensive part is rarely the attack itself. It is getting back up.

Most owners assume they are covered because they have backups. But backup and recovery are not the same thing, and the difference is where businesses get hurt. A backup is a copy of your data. Recovery is your whole business running again: the systems live, orders flowing, staff working, and fast enough that you survive the gap. You can have the first and still not have the second. Attackers understand this better than most: Sophos found that in 94 percent of ransomware attacks the criminals went straight for the backups, and when they succeeded the recovery bill ran about eight times higher. The safety net has become the first target.

Backups fail as recovery in three quiet ways. The copy sits on the same network or in the same building, so the flood, the fire or the ransomware takes it along with everything else. Or nobody ever tests a restore, so on the day it turns out to be corrupt or incomplete. Or it works, but bringing it all back takes days while the business bleeds. This is why the use of backups to actually restore data has fallen to a six-year low, just 54 percent of cases, and why nearly half of victims still end up paying.

None of this is a distant, overseas problem. Ransomware against Malaysian businesses rose 42 percent in 2025, and CyberSecurity Malaysia notes that SMEs are singled out precisely because their backup practices are inconsistent. Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s systems were hit with a ten million US dollar demand, and a Selangor factory lost two full weeks of production to an attack. The average data breach in Malaysia now costs around RM3.2 million. And under the PDPA’s 72-hour breach rule, a slow, messy recovery is now a compliance problem too, not only an operational one.

The answer is not more storage. It is real recovery. BigBand keeps a clean, encrypted copy of your data offsite in its Tier III Cyberjaya facility, separate from your premises and locked so ransomware cannot reach it, then pairs it with managed recovery so that when the worst happens, someone is accountable for getting you trading again inside an agreed time, not “someday.” Behind it sit twenty years of local track record and a Malaysian team you can reach by name. A bad day becomes a setback you planned for, not the end of the business.

Book Your Business Recovery Review
+60 3 5879 3933   |   [email protected]