Conceptually the backend configuration should be validated when creating
or opening the backend, but not when filling in information from
environment variables into the configuration.
In order to change the backend initialization in `global.go` to be able
to generically call cfg.ApplyEnvironment() for supported backends, the
`interface{}` returned by `ParseConfig` must contain a pointer to the
configuration.
An alternative would be to use reflection to convert the type from
`interface{}(Config)` to `interface{}(*Config)` (from value to pointer
type). However, this would just complicate the type mess further.
