The Test That Broke Production: Isolated Recovery Done Properly
It was firewalled. It was not isolated. A restored directory sync server found outbound 443, reached the live tenant, and pushed a two week old view of the directory into production.
-
-
The Other Two Hours: What Has to Be Working Before Your Application Is
The application came back and then every screen took a minute to load. Certificates, DNS, time, licensing and service accounts: the dependencies nobody maps are the ones that cost you the hours.
-
The Restore Nobody Could Log Into
Forty minutes to restore the application. Six hours before anyone could log into it. Why identity sits on the critical path for every recovery you will ever run, and what restoring a domain controller actually involves.
-
Green Jobs Are Not Evidence: What a Restore Test Actually Has to Prove
First in a six-part series on restore testing. The client described here is a composite, drawn from a few engagements that shared the same shape. The details are real. The organisation isn’t. Every backup article ever written ends the same…
-
Flexibility Is the Feature: Why Backup and DR Have to Outlast Your Hypervisor Choice
For the best part of two decades, picking a hypervisor was the easy bit. VMware was the default, and every backup and replication vendor built their integration around it first. VADP, journal-based CDP, tag-driven job scoping… The whole ecosystem grew…
-
The Tesco Problem: When Your Backup Tools Can’t Follow Your Infrastructure
A few weeks back, buried in the filings of a £100 million High Court case between Tesco and Broadcom, there was a sentence that deserves more attention than it got. Tesco confirmed it is migrating roughly 40,000 servers off VMware….
-
NIS2 Transposition in Ireland: Where It Actually Stands (July 2026 Update)
On 9 July 2026, the European Commission referred Ireland to the Court of Justice of the EU for failing to transpose NIS2. Spain, France, and the Netherlands were referred alongside it. This isn’t a warning letter. It’s the Commission asking…
-
The Per-Seat Model Is Borrowed Time
I’m a technologist by trade, but the business side of the MSP space has always interested me. I’ve been listening to Dave Sobel’s Business of Tech podcast for a while now, and yesterday’s episode, a repost from a sister publication,…
-
Data Sovereignty is an essential – The CLOUD Act just proved it – again
Microsoft handed Dutch civil servants’ names to the U.S. House of Representatives. No court order. No judicial review on European soil. Just a statute that overrides every contractual assurance you’ve ever been sold. Last month, Vrij Nederland broke a story…
-
Cyber Insurance and Backup: What Your Insurer Is Actually Checking
Ireland has had a rough few years as a target. The HSE attack in 2021 cost an estimated €600 million to recover from, took four months to fully remediate, and became one of the most referenced ransomware case studies in…
