Article
Experience Day 2026: The questions IT leaders are asking about resilience
On Thursday 2nd July, we welcomed customers from across the UK to Stratton Court Barn in Oxfordshire for the Covenco Experience Day 2026. The premise of the day was straightforward: rather than presenting to an audience, we wanted to give leaders in IT departments and Security teams direct access to the specialists behind the platforms they rely on – and the space to ask the questions that rarely fit into a sales call.
The video above captures the day. Below is a summary of what was discussed, and why the themes matter for anyone reviewing their organisation’s resilience this year.
The difference between assuming recovery and proving it.
A single thread ran through every session: confidence in recovery is not the same as evidence of recovery. Most organisations believe they can restore quickly after an incident. Far fewer have tested that belief under realistic conditions – and ransomware operators increasingly count on the gap between the two.
Veeam’s session examined this directly, walking through the platform roadmap and a live demonstration of Securiti.AI, which addresses one of the least visible risks in most environments: unstructured data. For many organisations, this is the largest and fastest-growing category of data they hold, and the hardest to classify, govern and prove recoverable. The discussion that followed focused on practical first steps for teams that already run Veeam and want to move from backup assurance to recovery evidence.
AI is changing the economics of Cyber Attack.
LRQA brought the threat intelligence perspective, and it was a sobering one. AI is lowering the cost and raising the speed of ransomware operations – from reconnaissance and phishing through to the targeting of backup infrastructure itself. Attackers understand that whoever controls the backup controls the recovery, which is why backup environments are now a primary target rather than an afterthought.
One question from the panel session summed up the practical implication: given AI-assisted attackers, are the patching SLA’s written two or three years ago still appropriate? For many organisations, the honest answer is no – and revisiting them costs considerably less than discovering the fact mid-incident.
Quantum Threats arrive before quantum computers do.
Quantropi’s session addressed a threat with an unusual property: it applies retrospectively. Data encrypted today can be harvested now and decrypted later, once quantum computers capable of breaking current cryptographic standards exist. The timeline for that capability is shorter than most IT leaders assume, which means data with a long confidentiality lifespan – contracts, health records, intellectual property, personal data – is already exposed to a future risk.
The discussion focused on what a practical, phased path to quantum readiness looks like for a mid-market organisation: understanding where cryptographic risk sits in the estate, and beginning the planning now rather than treating it as a problem for the 2030s.
The panel: real environments, real questions.
The morning closed with an open panel spanning Veeam, LRQA, Quantropi, Object First, Wasabi, Scality and IBM. Topics ranged from immutable backup copies and protection against administrator compromise, to the storage architecture decisions that either support or undermine rapid recovery, to how a storage-level cyber recovery conversation earns board-level sign-off.
What made the session valuable was the specificity. These were not hypothetical questions – they came from the environments attendees manage every day, across sectors as varied as manufacturing, education, local government, aviation and financial services.
An afternoon of fun activities in the Oxfordshire countryside.
The day is called an Experience Day for a reason. After a BBQ lunch and networking on the terrace, attendees spent the afternoon on the activities Stratton Court Barn does so well – off-road buggies, quad trekking, and a few pursuits best not attempted before lunch. Just as valuable was the time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges in very different industries.
Our thanks to everyone who attended, and to the specialists from Veeam, LRQA, Quantropi, Object First, Wasabi, Scality and IBM who gave the day its substance.
Continue the conversation.
If any of the themes above are on your agenda – recovery testing, immutable storage, AI-driven threats or quantum readiness – we would be glad to talk them through in the context of your environment. Covenco has helped organisations protect, recover and modernise their data infrastructure since 1989.