Yes Virginia, there really is a day to celebrate or commemorate everything!  And this week, or more specifically, March 31st is World Backup Day.  In this day and age, perhaps there's never been a more important time to celebrate awareness around having a backup and recovery strategy.

What is World Backup Day?

World Backup Day started in 2011 and is a day about backup awareness and getting people to start backing up their computers and data if they aren't already doing so.  For those that do, it's a time of year to remind them to make sure they've validated that their backup strategy is up to speed and effective.

"I'm thrilled with the response to World Backup Day, and I hope it's made a difference in people's lives," said World Backup Day founder Ismail Jadun.  "We all know someone who has lost critical data, whether it was their videos, photos, music, book reports, or personal stuff.  Hopefully this day will make everyone think about their situation, learn about the various options and get their files backed up.  I hope that World Backup Day sparks conversations about the enormous task of saving our digital heritage for future generations."

So what about you?  Have you backed up your personal data recently?  What about your business?

Every day, people and businesses lose valuable data and information because they fail to follow a simple backup procedure.  And that data continues to explode!  People now create and generate over 1.8 zettabytes of data per year.  Seriously, that's a lot of data needing protection!  Unfortunately, nearly 30% of people have never even backed up their data.

World Backup Day should bring about awareness and create a reminder for all of us to backup things up.  No matter how secure or safe you feel about your data, know that it's important to backup your files.

You could be affected in a number of ways, including:

• Hardware Failures - This is the leading cause of data loss. Ever read up on the MTBF of each of your devices? Yes, hardware will crash and burn. Be ready! I was myself a recent victim of a hard drive failure. Luckily, I backup locally and to the cloud.
• Cyber Attacks - In 2017, you're going to continue to read more and more about cyber attacks. Don't be a victim. Have a plan at the ready.
• Natural Disasters - Think a natural disaster won't affect you? It can, and for businesses, it can be devastating. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a natural disaster ended up filing for bankruptcy within one year later.
• Human Error - Oh yeah, mistakes happen. And when human beings are involved, the old saying of what can go wrong, will go wrong is common.

Remember, a backup is only as good as your ability to recover the data.  As part of your backup strategy, make sure to have a recovery plan.  Be prepared to recover an entire system, a folder or collection of folders, and a single file.

Don't take my word for it.  Hear from some of the experts in the backup and disaster recovery industry for more commentary.

"Organizations can no longer take backup as good enough, there is a need for Availability. Veeam celebrates World Availability Day on March 31 to not be fooled on April 1! We are currently in the ransomware era, when organizations are required to take data and its care more seriously than ever. The good news is that there are technologies in place to maintain the Availability experience and allow organizations to do what they need to do. One practical tip that organizations of any type and size can use is to ensure there is some form of offline or air-gapped instance of the data. Whether this is a backup in the cloud, backup on offline disk or a backup on tape; the risks and expectations today are higher than ever." -- Rick Vanover, Director, Technical Product Marketing, Veeam

"Line of Business executives understand the importance of availability more than ever, but it is imperative that data centers do not contain uniform environments all over. While virtualization has taken the major share, physical environments and legacy applications are still being used in data centers based on the requirements of businesses. Modern backup vendors are more focused on virtualization leaving behind backup for physical and legacy applications. Vembu, with more than a decade of experience, provides availability to Virtual, Physical and Legacy applications. Understanding the significance of Backup & DR, Vembu has announced the entire month of March as the month of Backup, thus providing 10% flat discount to their Vembu BDR Suite of products." -- Nagarajan C - Product Manager, Vembu BDR Suite

"Data loss and disruption happens far too often in the enterprise. Research by Ponemon in 2016 estimates the average cost of an unplanned outage has spiralled to nearly $9,000 a minute, causing crippling downtime as well as financial and reputational damage. Legacy backups simply aren't equipped to provide seamless operations, with zero Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) should a disaster strike. In order to guarantee the availability of applications, synchronous replication with real-time analytics needs to be simple to setup, monitor and manage for application owners and economical to the organization. That way, making zero data loss attainable suddenly becomes a reality." -- Chuck Dubuque, VP Product Marketing, Tintri

"While many might see World Backup Day as a reminder of how vulnerable we are if we don't protect our data, at Commvault, we think enterprises should be motivated by the opportunity to find value in the data that comes with a strong backup strategy. World Backup Day is a reminder of the importance of implementing a truly holistic data management strategy, one that ensures all data is backed up wherever it exists (including the cloud, virtual machines, mobile devices, and on any infrastructure). Such a strategy can not only mitigate business risk and improve IT outcomes, it can assure companies can activate their data to derive value and strategic insights that increase business agility and provide a competitive advantage."  -- Bill Wohl, Chief Communications Officer, Commvault

"It's only a matter of time before your datacenter experiences a significant outage, if it hasn't already, due to a wide range of causes, from something as simple as human error or power failure to criminal activity like ransomware and cyberattacks, or even more catastrophic events like hurricanes. Shifting thinking to ‘when' as opposed to ‘if' something like this happens is crucial; crucial to building a more flexible and resilient IT infrastructure that can withstand any kind of disruption resulting in negative impact on business performance.  World Backup Day reminds us of the importance of both having a backup plan in place and as well as conducting regular reviews of current and new technology to do everything possible to keep business running without interruption. Organizations today are highly aware that they are heavily dependent on data and critical applications, and that losing even just an hour of data can greatly harm revenues and brand reputation, sometimes beyond repair. Savvy businesses are taking an all-inclusive approach to this problem that incorporates cloud-based technologies into their disaster recovery plans. And with consistent testing and automation, they are ensuring that those plans are extremely simple to execute against in even the most challenging of situations, a key element of successfully avoiding damaging downtime." -- Rob Strechay, VP Product, Zerto

"With today's "always-on" business environment, data loss can destroy a company's brand and customer trust. A multiple software-based strategy with software-defined and hyperconverged storage infrastructure is the most effective route for a flexible backup plan.  With this tactic, snapshots, replication and stretched clusters can help protect data, whether in a local data center cluster, across data centers or across the cloud. IT teams rely on these software-based policies as the backbone of their disaster recovery implementations as the human element is removed. This is possible as the software-based strategy dictates that all virtual machines are accurately, automatically and consistently replicated to the DR sites. Through this automatic and transparent approach, no administrator action is required, saving employees time, money and providing peace of mind that business can carry on despite any outage." -- Patrick Brennan, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Atlantis Computing 

"Data is one of the most valuable business assets and when it comes to data protection chief among its IT challenges is the ever-growing rate of data and the associated vulnerability. Backup needs to be reliable, fast and cost efficient. Organizations are on the defensive after a disaster and being able to recover critical data within minutes is crucial. Breakthroughs in disk technologies and pricing have led to very dense arrays that are power, cost and performance efficient. Backup has been revolutionized and organizations need to ensure they are safeguarding their most valuable commodity - not just now but for the long term. Secure archive platforms are complementary and create a complete recovery strategy." -- Geoff Barrall, COO, Nexsan

"Data backup and disaster recovery used to be treated as separate processes, which added complexity. But with object storage as a backup target you now have multiple options to bring backup and DR together in a single flow. You can configure a hybrid cloud and tier a portion of your data to the public cloud, or you can locate object storage nodes at different locations and use replication to provide geographic separation. So, this World Backup Day, consider how object storage has increased your options for meeting this critical need." -- Jon Toor, CMO, Cloudian

"On World Backup Day, it's a good time to recognize how far the market has come in protecting mission-critical business data. The scalability, flexibility and on-demand nature of the cloud means that backup and DR strategies that were previously only available to large enterprise customers are now also within the reach of small and medium sized businesses.  Indeed, many of our customers have evolved from onsite backup to cloud backup to a full cloud-based disaster recovery strategy.  While risks ranging from the dramatic; hurricanes, storms and ransomware attacks to the mundane; power outages, unauthorized changes and human error are only increasing, companies of all sizes can be confident that the technology and expert assistance is available to help them achieve IT resiliency and business continuity." -- Brian Ussher, President and Co-Founder, iland

"This year's Acronis World Backup Day Survey exposed a serious disparity between the value our respondents assigned to data and what they did to protect it. Most people realize that their data is valuable and that it would be disastrous to lose it, however, not many people do more than just copying a few files to a USB drive or a public cloud account. Data protection requires a lot more. Every server, every workstation and every cloud account is under a threat from ransomware and there is a great need to protect backups from this debilitating malware. This is exactly what Acronis Active Protection does. Initially deployed in Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation home backup, this real-time anti-malware technology is currently being rolled out across the full range of Acronis data protection products. Proven by independent tests, this technology monitors computer processes and blocks ransomware attempts before they damage the data. Acronis leads the market in this area and it makes sense to take advantage of this technology before it's too late." -- John Zanni, CMO, Acronis 

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