A well-formulated backup strategy is critical to business survival, and IT teams are under more pressure to ensure protection for the data of organizations.
World Backup Day serves as a reminder for enterprises and individuals to continue to remain proactive when it comes to managing their data.
Not only should organizations have a backup strategy, it is also extremely important for IT teams to test it regularly.
The first time a business tests their backup tactics should not be during an emergency.
Data needs to be easily recoverable and accessible when needed, as a data loss can have devastating effects on a company’s reputation,” said Neil Barton, CTO, WhereScape.
Mission-critical data fuels the speed of today’s businesses, which is why it’s essential that backup and disaster recovery plans are made a top priority.
World Backup Day is an important reminder of this reality, with many organizations forgetting a few essentials to a solid backup plan.
First, performing backups as frequently as possible often falls by the wayside of priorities, but this is a very effective way to prevent data loss.
Moreover, the location of your backup must be kept top-of-mind, the closer it is to the primary data, the better.
In addition, cyberthreats like ransomware came about after many legacy backup and disaster recovery plans were created, so it’s important to ensure that IT infrastructure is secure and safeguarded with a disaster recovery plan.
Finally, while emphasis is frequently on the recovery point of when your last backup was taken, recovery time is just as important.
The bottom line is backup and disaster recovery plans must be assessed consistently to safeguard data and protect organizations from being taken off guard by the next disaster,” said Alan Conboy, office of the CTO, Scale Computing.
Losing important data can be absolutely devastating to a business’s operations, customers, and even reputation.
But it can be hard for internal IT teams to manage the required technologies on their own.
Managed data backups are one of the most vital services an MSP can provide its clients, who depend on them to protect their data, ensure disaster recovery, and maintain business continuity.
You never know when a natural disaster will strike your customer, or when they will be the target of a cyberattack.
World Backup Day serves as a great reminder for MSPs on the importance of helping clients establish a comprehensive and well-formulated backup strategy that includes proactive monitoring, remediation and advanced troubleshooting.
And with the ease and availability of cloud backup solutions, there’s no reason MSPs shouldn’t make it a top priority for clients,” said Jason Magee, CEO, ConnectWise.
In an age where ransomware poses a very real threat, on World Backup Day, many organizations will be considering the most effective ways of keeping their data safe in case of attack.
But ransomware attacks can have a much larger impact than temporarily denying access to certain files or systems in exchange for payment—the demanded ransom amounts often pale in comparison to the collateral damage and downtime costs they cause.
This includes the destruction of data on backup disks, such as records being kept for compliance, corporate governance and other business reasons.
Unfortunately, this insidious software is almost always detected after the damage has already occurred, when the hacker demands a ransom.
The key to detecting and stopping ransomware is to find attackers in your system before they begin to encrypt files or data.
One way is deploying user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), which can detect the telltale signs of ransomware as it enters your IT environment.
A behavior-based approach baselines normal user behavior, which provides the context necessary to track any ransomware-triggered deviations, and helps you identify an attack earlier in its kill chain, such as during the infection, staging, or scanning phases—before encryption occurs,” said Trevor Daughney, VP, product marketing, Exabeam.
Data has become an integral component of our personal and professional lives, and today’s organizations can never know when a disaster may strike or in what form.
Cyberattackers have the ability to hack into servers and delete all saved data, but natural disasters such as fires and floods and even human error can have just as catastrophic results.
That’s why World Backup Day serves as a reminder for every organization to create or revisit its disaster recovery plan and learn about what other backup options are available.
DR plans don’t have to be overly complicated.
They just need to exist — and be regularly tested to ensure they work as planned.
To help, start with the basics – data replication copies data in real- or near-real time, giving you a more up-to-date version of your data, and typically is performed in the cloud.
Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) may be the most comprehensive option by providing a recovery point objective of a few seconds or allowing you to reach back further if needed, also the ability to recover applications instantly and automatically, and a lower price tag by eliminating software licenses and hardware.
While these are just a few options available, your organization should always be striving to learn more and do more to protect its irreplaceable data,” said Trevor Bidle, VP of information security and compliance, US Signal.
On World Backup Day, it’s important to be aware of the risks that come with storing vast amounts of sensitive information, such as paper documents and digital records siloed on hard drives and tape drives, in file rooms or at third party facilities.
In these places, data and information are not only vulnerable to being misplaced or damaged, but also face a whole host of security issues and risks.
Rather than spending valuable time and effort determining which records we can afford to protect, or how to save them after trouble strikes, companies should aim to protect all their data regardless of the source.
The most important thing any company can do to secure and backup its records is to digitize them and make them accessible securely in the cloud.
Once records are digitized and stored in the cloud, a disaster recovery plan is automatically in place, because records are no longer reliant on the physical storage where they were kept,” said Alex Fielding, founder & iCEO, Ripcord.
When we celebrate World Backup Day in our interconnected age, it is increasingly important that organizations not only backup their data, but that their network has a backup plan as well.
It’s no longer a question of whether your business will lose Internet connectivity, it’s when.
In some areas Internet connectivity can experience service disruption up to several times a month, which exposes businesses to risks of lost revenue, reduced productivity and customer experience issues.
New technologies including 4G LTE failover, Gigabit-Class LTE, cloud-based management and orchestration and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) are important to keep in mind.
It is key to look for solutions that prioritize and protect many more applications during primary WAN outages, allowing enterprises to keep their operations running as usual without interruption,” said Ken Hosac, VP of IoT strategy and business development, Cradlepoint.
World Backup Day is a perfect opportunity for businesses to ask themselves the following questions: How much time am I prepared to have mission-critical functions unavailable?.How much data am I prepared to lose?.How much money will it cost while these services are not available?.If these questions are raising concerns, then you need to address your Backup strategy now.
The most valuable assets should be prioritized and organizations need to be demanding about the quality, scalability and reliability of Backup solutions.
The process of backing up data is pivotal to a successful Disaster Recovery plan,” said Eltjo Hofstee, managing director, Leaseweb UK.
In 2011, World Backup Day began to remind us of the importance of having a copy of our information.
And while the significance of this day has only grown in the years since it was first celebrated, backup technology has barely begun to evolve.
From tape, to hard drive and now cloud, which is really tape in many cases, the target and management have changed, yet fundamentally it is still based on periodic snapshots of information.
But in an ‘always-on’ business landscape, how can an organization feel protected with an antiquated backup strategy?.The answer is it can’t.
Data is the primary currency and competitive differentiator, it should all be protected by continuous replication which ensures every change, update or added piece of data is always available.
This World Backup Day, don’t settle for the status quo of backup, demand more.
Demand continuous, with the reassurance that all data is protected up to a moment before anything disrupts it,” said Rob Strechay, senior vice president of product, Zerto.
In order to provide the utmost protection for your data, it is absolutely necessary in today’s corporate world to have the proper backup and data recovery system.
Luckily, archive storage solutions are available to help eliminate data loss as well as provide added layers of security from tampering, corruption and ransomware.
These archive storage solutions are additionally able to increase the efforts of driving cost and performance benefits by simply allowing for greater long-term retention of data.
For a data backup strategy to reach its highest potential, the strategy should include data protection, enhanced security features and peak performance of storage,” said Rod Harrison, VP of engineering of StorCentric.
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