You moved to the cloud and you assume backups are handled. That is a fair assumption to make. It is also the assumption that turns a routine data loss into a board-level event. The cloud provider keeps the infrastructure running. Your data, your backups, and your ability to recover stay with you. That split is written into the contract you signed, and almost nobody reads that part until the day it matters.
Here is the part that catches finance-grade businesses out. The provider guarantees the platform is available. They do not guarantee your database is recoverable to the point in time you need. If someone drops a table, runs a bad update, or a database quietly corrupts, the platform is still up and running perfectly. It is up and running with your damaged data inside it. Availability and recoverability are two different promises, and you were only sold one of them.
So let me ask the unsettling question first. If your main database was wrong at 9am tomorrow, not down, just wrong, do you know who restores it, from what, and to which minute? Most teams cannot answer that without going to ask someone. The honest version of that answer is usually a default retention setting that nobody chose, nobody tested, and nobody can tell you the age of.
Would it be unreasonable to want that answer in writing before you need it? You are not behind on this. The shared-responsibility line is genuinely confusing, and it is designed to favour the provider, not you. The trap is reasonable people reading the word cloud as a synonym for safe. The server has been running clean the whole time. That was never the same thing as your data being recoverable.
What would it actually cost the business to lose a day of this data, and how would you prove to a regulator or an insurer that you could get it back? That number, and that proof, are the whole argument. If you cannot state both in plain language, the gap is not technical. It is sitting unowned, waiting for the recovery that finally exposes it.
A free, read-only 15-minute health check answers it without touching your systems. We look at what is actually protecting your data in the cloud, what your real recovery position is, and where the contract leaves the job to you. You get a graded, plain-English report you can hand straight to the board. No agents, no changes, no sales follow-up you did not ask for.
Want to know if this is sitting in your estate? We run a read-only check and hand you a graded report in plain English.
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