Over the years, our team at Parallo has worked with a wide range of organisations across industries and sizes. And one pattern comes up time and time again, so consistently that we felt compelled to write about it. The names are fictional, but the scenario below is drawn directly from real experiences and observations. If it feels familiar, it probably should.

There's a quiet irony playing out in organisations around the world. The same leadership teams that invest heavily in strategy, talent, and growth are often leaving one of their most existential risks, data protection, in the hands of the last person hired.

Meet Kevin. Kevin's new. Enthusiastic, capable, and keen to prove himself. On his first week, Steve from IT spends twenty minutes walking him through the backup systems before disappearing, relieved to finally hand off what everyone privately considers the dullest job in the department. Kevin nods along, not wanting to seem out of his depth. And just like that, your organisation's ability to survive a crisis has a new owner.

We've seen this moment play out more times than we can count. And what happens next is almost always the same.

Kevin gets busy. There's always something more pressing, more visible, more interesting than checking backups. An alert comes in flagging a failed job. It sits in the queue for a day. Then a few days. Then a week. Not out of negligence, out of competing priorities, limited experience, and the simple fact that nobody told Kevin this was the most important thing on his list. Then something breaks.

How It Plays Out

The call starts at the top. The CEO notices something is wrong with the CRM, corrupted records, missing data. It gets escalated to the CIO, then the IT Manager, then the team. "Who's looking after backups?" And the answer, inevitably, is Kevin.

Kevin drops everything, logs into the backup console, and his stomach drops. The last successful backup was a week ago. A failed job had sat unresolved, and no one had caught it. An entire week of sales activity, customer interactions, and pipeline data, gone. And in this instance, it was a relatively contained incident affecting one system.

We've sat in those rooms. We've been part of those conversations. And we've seen the look on a CEO's face when they realise the gap between what they assumed was being managed and what was actually happening.

The Stakes Are Not Small

Data protection is the difference between your organisation recovering from a serious incident, or not. The scenarios your business could face range from an accidental deletion of a critical file, a server or infrastructure failure, a regional data centre outage, through to a full-scale ransomware attack that encrypts or destroys everything.

In each case, the question is the same: can you recover, how quickly, and how much will you lose?

Now imagine the Kevin scenario, but the incident is a ransomware attack across your entire environment. Payroll. Finance. Customer records. Operations. A week of data loss, or more. The reporting obligations to the board, regulators, customers, and potentially the market. For some organisations, that is a business-ending event. We have seen it come close.

The Numbers Tell the Story

This isn't anecdotal. Organisations managing their own data protection typically achieve a backup success rate of less than 70%. That means nearly one in three backup jobs is failing, often silently, often unnoticed until it's too late.

With a dedicated, well-managed data protection service, that figure rises to greater than 99.9%. The difference between those two numbers is not a technical detail. It is operational and financial risk at board level.

Questions the CEO and Board Should Be Asking

If data protection hasn't been on your board agenda recently, these are the questions worth raising. If the answers aren't immediately clear, that tells you something important:

→ Who owns data protection in our organisation, and what is their level of experience and seniority?
→ When did we last test our ability to recover, not just check that backups are running, but actually restore systems and validate the data?
→ What is our current backup success rate, and who reviews it?
→ What is our Recovery Point Objective (RPO), how much data could we lose, and is that acceptable to the business?
→ What is our Recovery Time Objective (RTO), how long would recovery take, and have we modelled the cost of that downtime?
→ Are we confident we could recover from a ransomware attack that compromised our primary systems and our backups simultaneously
→ When did the board last receive a data protection risk report?

If any of these questions produce hesitation, uncertainty, or a referral to someone junior to find out, that is itself the answer.

Closing the Gap

The disparity between how critical data protection is and how much organisational attention it receives is one of the most consistent patterns our team has observed across the industry. It rarely surfaces until something goes wrong, and by then, the cost of under investment becomes very clear, very fast.

Parallo offers a data protection assessment, strategy, and fully managed service, designed to give leadership teams the visibility, confidence, and capability they need. From understanding your current risk exposure, to building a fit-for-purpose strategy, to taking on the day-to-day management with the rigour it deserves.

Because data protection is too important for Kevin's first week on the job. And your business is too important to find that out the hard way.