There's a "DAY" for almost anything these days, but here's one that should be on your calendar - World Backup day, March 31, 2018. Whether its personal or business, here's a great reminder for you to celebrate awareness around having a backup and recovery strategy.
So what
about you? Have you backed up your personal
data recently? What about your business? When was the last time you made a backup or verified it? Data loss can happen to anyone and often from the smallest accidents like
losing your phone or camera. Data backup services help you keep a second
copy of all your valuable data somewhere safe for easy recovery. Using a cloud service or a physical drive is key.
According to worldbackupday.com, 30% of people have never backed up their data,
yet 113 phones are stolen every minute and 1 in 10 computers are infected with
viruses each month.
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. World Backup Day was chosen to be the day before
April 1st (April Fools) in order to drive the message home.
We all know someone who has been affected by data loss. Hopefully this day will make
everyone think twice about their situation, and educate themselves on the various options available to them so that they can get things backed up.
You can even take the World Backup Day pledge on Facebook and Twitter, it reads: "I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on March 31st."
I will also tell my friends and family about World Backup Day - friends don't let friends go without a backup.
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.
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!
-
Cyber Attacks - In 2018, 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. 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.
Don't
take my word for it. Hear from some of
the experts in the backup and disaster recovery industry for more commentary:
--
"In the spirit of World Backup Day, Commvault would like to
celebrate the unsung heroes working in the trenches of their IT organizations
to ward off never ending threats of ransomware, malware and other disasters.
Everyone should take time to recognize the critical role data backup and
management admins play in ensuring their enterprise's success in the face of
unprecedented data growth, risk and complexity. These unsung IT heroes, often
found working late at their cubicle or deep in their firm's data center, are
responsible for managing and protecting one of their enterprise's core assets -
its data. They must do this even as data volumes grow exponentially and as the types of
clouds and other infrastructure data is stored on proliferates. They do it
while sophisticated cybercriminals increasingly seek to steal or disable this
data, and governments around the world implement new data privacy regulations.
Yet not only are these backup admins protecting this data, they are activating
it - enabling DevOps to employ it to launch new digital services and marketing
teams to analyze it for valuable insights and competitive gain. So, as you
consider how these data backup and management admins are not just keeping your
enterprise's operations running but also enabling you to achieve new,
remarkable data-driven feats, make sure to pat them on the back, send them a
"Thank You" email, or buy them a drink at your next company happy hour." -- Bill
Wohl, Chief Communications Officer, Commvault
"World Backup Day
is an initiative to raise awareness about backups and data preservation - a day
for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the
importance of regular backups. Have you backed up your data recently?? No
matter how secure or safe you feel your data is, it's important to backup your
files regularly. In today's business world, despite providing the required
protection, there may be hundreds of ways in which our electronic data may get
prone to disaster leading to terrible consequences, causing all of your valuable
data to be gone beyond retrieval. Even if World Backup day
is once a year, it is set aside as a reminder to have a reserve copy of all the
valuable files you'd never want to lose. Be it VMware Backup, Hyper-V
Backup, Windows Server Backup or Workstations Backup or SaaS Backup,
you never know where the critical data resides. Why take a chance when
backup options are so easy and readily available?? Back them up!!!! To
ensure your data safety, Vembu has come up with a 10%
flat discount on all your new purchases of Vembu BDR suite.
Explore this opportunity and discover a cost effective way of keeping
your important data safe with the Data Backup and DR mechanism of Vembu BDR
suite." -- Abdul Khader Jeelani - Lead - Marketing Analyst, Vembu
"As we learned with the increase in
ransomware over the last year, organizations can no longer
take backup as good enough, there is a need for Availability. Veeam
celebrates World Availability Day on March 30 to not be fooled on April 1! Beyond
ransomware, organizations are faced with employees and customers looking for
and expecting the always-on experience. In order to provide this, organizations
are required to take data and its care more seriously than ever. The good news
is 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, Product Strategy, Veeam
"Commvault
is redefining what backup and recovery means to the progressive enterprise.
Companies are managing more data than ever, on a greater diversity of clouds,
endpoints and infrastructures. The market is
demanding smarter automated solutions to protect all data types quickly. With
the demand for smart protection follows the requirement for a smart and
automated fast recovery. Enterprises can no longer depend on complex and
incomplete backup strategies for their data. When disaster strikes this strategy
will lead to slow or incomplete recovery, and the threat of ransomware and
other potential disasters are reminding us to act on improving recovery
readiness every day. Given this complexity of data environments, the most
urgent question enterprises should ask themselves this World Backup Day is not
necessarily "are they backed up" but, "are they protected in a way they can
recover fast?" --
Don Foster, Senior Director of Worldwide Solutions
Marketing, Commvault
"Backup is
busywork. Busy in the sense that it focuses on actions. Backup only becomes
productive when there is a disaster and IT needs to recover the data and applications
as quickly as possible in order to reestablish business continuity. This
is the business value of backup. Organizations should ensure that their apps
and data can recover gracefully and efficaciously from any given disaster
regardless of on-premises or off-premises. They need to incorporate backup into
their business continuity strategy, which includes a proper backup tool and
disaster recovery process. At a minimum, businesses should implement backup
best practices like the 3-2-1 rules: three copies of the data; two different
storage mediums/devices; and one copy offsite. Happy World Backup Day! As an IT pro, be
sure to integrate backup as part of your data and application ARRR
(availability, reliability, resiliency, and recoverability) pillars." -- Kong Yang, Head Geek,
SolarWinds
"From cybercrime to natural disasters to
shadow IT, businesses today have a lot to contend with in order to mitigate
data loss and keep their systems and data up, running and available at all
times. Disruption these days is no longer a matter
of ‘if', but 'when', and companies who fail to have a backup
and recovery plan in place when disaster strikes are quite literally putting
their business on the line. In fact, it's estimated that unplanned application
downtime costs the Fortune 1000 up to $2.5 billion per year (AppDynamics). World Backup Day serves as an important reminder to businesses to stop
and think about their data backup and recovery
posture and ensure they're employing the right data protection plan, processes
and solutions. The goal should always be to have the ability to instantly and
cost-effectively recover all data across on-premises, virtualized, cloud and
hybrid-based systems and applications with zero impact on the end user. If
businesses are not meeting this goal, it's time to reassess those plans,
processes and solutions -- and there's no better time to start than
today." -- Adrian Moir, lead technology
evangelist at Quest's Data Protection business unit
"March 31 is Backup Day. But, on April 1 can you restore?
Don't be an April Fool. Ransomware can hit your backup files if they're not
protected, making them unusable. One solution is a backup target device that
protects backup data from change or deletion. With WORM technology, your data
cannot be altered or deleted, even by a virus. WORM is built into solutions
such as Cloudian's enterprise storage, making it easy to implement without
changing the backup work flow. Deploy Cloudian limitlessly-scalable enterprise
storage as the target, enable the WORM feature, and your data is protected.
Whether using Rubrik, Veritas, Commvault, or Veeam, your backup process stays
the same. Restore is both secure and instantaneous. March 31 is Backup Day.
Make sure that April 1 is Restore Day." -- Jon Toor, CMO, Cloudian
"Our
recent research shows that, while over half of the businesses surveyed say they
have a disaster recovery plan in place, of those organizations, 59% say they
test their DR plans once per year or less. World Backup Day should be a
reminder, that if you have a DR plan in place, test it
often. Also, World Backup Day is actually a misnomer. It should
really be called Disaster Recovery day or even Disaster Avoidance
day. While we don't have the power to bend the space time continuum and
change the course of events, there's plenty we can and should do to mitigate IT
incidents and disasters to the point where they become invisible to the end
user. Think of the light flickering when the generator kicks in. Did the light
ever go out? That is the state of where I believe we, as data protection and
disaster recovery providers, should help organizations of all sizes get to. By
leveraging great technologies based on sound data protection techniques and our
legacies as backup and recovery experts, we can help IT truly be at the heart
of business continuity." -- Christophe Bertrand, VP of Product Marketing,
Arcserve
"Hit by a ransomware attack last week and still
reportedly working round the clock to become fully
operational, the city of Atlanta, including parts of the
airport and city data, are still locked behind an encryption
wall. This is the latest in a long list of ransomware attacks
that have recently dominated the headlines. With the threat
landscape continuously growing, and World Backup Day falling
this weekend, it is a good time to think about how well your data is
protected. Backup alone is not protection, especially when backup
files themselves can be afflicted if disaster strikes. Organisations
should be looking to a solution like object storage, which can replicate data
across multiple sites and store it in a manner that is unchangeable, even
by ransomware. The solution therefore provides a double security layer for
data that is immediately accessible, without having to spend time on a lengthy
backup process. If Atlanta has immutable backup files, they would not find
themselves, a week post attack, still grappling with turning the lights and
computers back on across the city." -- Neil Stobart, VP of Global Systems Engineering at
Cloudian
"The good news about this year's
World Backup Day survey results is that fewer people reported losing data
last year. As a data protection company, we are always glad to hear that. But
the fact that fewer respondents are backing up - despite being more aware of
threats like ransomware - shows a tremendous disconnect. Secure backup is still
the most effective way to ensure data is never lost, and it becomes even more
vital as online threats continue to grow. Efforts to educate the public about
the risks they face clearly need to continue throughout 2018." -- John Zanni, President, Acronis
"On World
Backup Day, companies should consider if they have all of their data backed up
and if their backup and disaster recovery contingencies are ready for a
real-world scenario. Not all data has the same urgency for recovery but all
data is valuable. Backup can
prevent revenue loss from human error, technical failure, Mother Nature, and of
course cyberattacks. Your IT service provider should be able to match a
solution to an acceptable recovery time. Do they know what their recovery
time is, how reliable those backups are, and are you testing them? In many
cases, these are questions they should be asking of their service providers,
who should be ready for increased scrutiny. From
enterprise-scale companies to SMBs, no company is immune from downtime. And,
when it happens, the immediate question is how quickly they can return to
normal, followed by an assessment of just how much damage was done. That's where
backup and disaster recovery is vital." -- Fielder Hiss, VP of Product, Continuum
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