Six Silent Killers of Cloud Backup 

Excerpted from a recent webinar, "Stop Wasting Time On Backups: Automate, Protect, And Simplify," with Andy Fernandez and Sathya Sankaran.

Andy and Sathya discussed the six hidden challenges that quietly erode the effectiveness of cloud backups. These “silent killers” don’t always get recognized outside of the IT teams dealing with them daily, but they can be devastating if ignored.

1. Console Chaos

Sathya: “I call them silent killers because they happen quietly in the background. Take console chaos: for years we talked about the ‘single pane of glass’ as the goal for data protection. But in the cloud, we’ve gone backwards—now you’re juggling multiple consoles across services, and the complexity just keeps growing.”

2. Automation Sprawl

“Then comes automation sprawl. In a multi-cloud environment, you’re running eight or ten services in each cloud, each with its own APIs. There’s no single solution that unifies this—unless, of course, you’re using HYCU. Teams end up spending huge amounts of time wiring together APIs just to get basic peace of mind against daily cyber threats.”

3. Database Blind Spots

“And even after all that, you still run into blind spots. Many DBaaS and PaaS services simply don’t have proper backup support. These are often your crown jewels, and yet they’re left exposed. Cloud providers promise many ‘nines’ of availability—but availability is not backup. When you lose data, the vendor’s SLA won’t save you. It’s still your problem.”

4. Egress Tax Trap

“Everyone knows about the ‘highway robbery’ of egress fees. Cloud is cost effective for storage, but the minute you need to move data, say, to build resiliency across providers, you hit a wall. That tax makes true multi-cloud risk management nearly impossible.”

5. Storage Swell

“On-premises, deduplication is table stakes. In the cloud, backups are often stored inefficiently, so your storage bill keeps ballooning. FinOps teams end up scrambling to rein it in. What looked cheap at first becomes an ongoing headache.”

6. Recovery Roadblocks

“And after all that effort, recovery still suffers. Granular restores are hard, DR options are limited, and if you’re pulling data from an archival tier, it can cost 10x more to get it back than to store. These recovery roadblocks are often invisible to leadership but painfully obvious to the teams in the trenches.”

The DIY Trap

Andy: “A lot of teams try the DIY route. It’s like building IKEA furniture—yes, it works, but it’s clunky, time-consuming, and fragile. People forget that their ‘backup solutions’ also include homegrown scripts and workflows they have to maintain. Over time, it turns into a full-blown Rube Goldberg machine—lots of moving parts, spaghetti automation, and still no guarantee of cross-region recovery or compliance.”

Sathya: “Exactly. You don’t want to be running eight different backup products—or even one heavily customized one—because the hidden costs pile up: time, energy, and lost focus on the business.”

The Bigger Picture

Andy: “This matters even more as organizations adopt AI and expand data warehousing across clouds. The more distributed your environment becomes, the more these hidden costs and pitfalls slow you down.”

Sathya: “Right. These silent killers don’t always show up in board reports, but they’re very real for the teams keeping the business running. If you don’t address them, your cloud journey will always be compromised.”