We've seen it all. Pizza Day. Puppies Day. Ice Cream Day. Super Hero Day. The list goes on and on. If there's a thing, there's probably a day for it.
But, have you heard about World Backup Day? While it may not be as cute as puppies, this day is extremely worthwhile both on a personal and business level. Let it be a great reminder to drive awareness around having a solid backup and recover strategy.
We celebrate World Backup Day every year on March 31st, and this year is no exception.
What is World Backup Day?
A quick bit of history. World
Backup Day started in 2011 as a day to promote backup awareness and
get people to start backing up their computers and data if they
weren'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. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that World Backup Day was chosen to be the day
before April 1st (April Fools) in order to drive the message home.
Your Data Is More Valuable Than Your Device
Hardware is cheap and getting cheaper. But do you know what's expensive... or even priceless? Your data. You can get a new computer or phone, but try replacing those important files that are lost: You can't! Not without a good backup.
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.
Backup... Restore
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 back 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:
--
"This year's World Backup Day is a good chance for IT
managers to take a hard look at their BCDR strategies to ensure they're ready
to meet the modern-day ransomware threat. Attackers are getting smarter by the
day and are doing what they can to stay one step ahead of cybersecurity
measures - just look at the rise of criminals targeting back up data, and then
publishing that data if the ransom is not met. IT managers must implement plans
that secure system access points from unwanted entry and deploy centralized
management to plug up any potential security gaps. They can also mitigate the
fallout from attacks by storing backups on separate domains via the 3-2-1 rule;
storing three copies of data on two different backup sites, with one being
stored off-site. By taking a whole-picture look at ransomware and proactively
developing a continuity plan, testing it, and communicating it widely
throughout the organization, businesses can avoid the pain of lost data and the
costs associated with getting systems back online." - Oussama El-Hilali, CTO at Arcserve
--
"World
Backup Day signifies the importance of data protection and the need for
seamless backups. For the past few years, there is a significant rise in the
number of organizations moving to the cloud or adopting hybrid environments.
Cloud has become essential for every organization to run its businesses without
any interruption. At the same time, many businesses face challenges like
exponential data growth and frequent data mobility across different data
centers that significantly increase the TCO of the organizations. We at Vembu
Technologies take customers' changing requirements seriously and address their
data protection challenges by offering Vembu BDR Suite - a centralized backup and disaster recovery software
at an affordable cost that can protect the data stored in any type of
infrastructure, like a virtual, physical, and cloud." - Nagarajan Chandrasekaran, Vice
President, Product Marketing and Management, Vembu
Technologies
--
"There is no more important time to embrace World Backup
Day. Like many other organizations around the world, Veeam is impacted by
current conditions. We have seen more people work from home for now and that is
where our advice for this year's World Backup Day will be.
Consider the work from home employee who is not accustomed
to this process. There is a need for backup now more than ever. This is a great
opportunity for Veeam Agent for Linux and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to
be used on endpoint devices at home. Backups can go to NAS device, a
removable drive (such as a USB Hard drive or SSD) a service provider or to the
Veeam infrastructure in the company's IT organization.
Having World Backup Day close to home where the
work may be is good. The good news is that the free edition of Veeam Agents for
Linux and Microsoft Windows will provide this capability to do backups and
restores for systems that you may not have had to do in the past." - Rick Vanover, Senior director of Product Strategy, Veeam Software
--
"So many songs remind us that we only know what we've got when we've
lost it. Backup software is about appreciating what we have while we still have
it, and taking the right steps to safeguard it. Data is an organization's life
blood. Systems admins and business owners often tell us about the nightmares
they faced before they had a backup solution in place, or when they had somehow
configured things badly. World Backup Day is a great time for all organizations
to assess where they stand in terms of their backup and recovery strategy and
setup, and to take action." - David Vella, CEO at Altaro Software
--
"The ability to manage data across
clouds while still getting the comprehensive level of backup and
recovery support you would expect from a purpose-built backup solution continues to stump much of the market. At HYCU, we are seeing thousands of customers moving to our "inverted
platform," HYCU Protégé, in which native backup and recovery services are inserted
into our cloud data management console for true multi-cloud data protection as
a service. This World Backup Day we are also very
conscious of the many challenges the world is seeing as a result of COVID-19
(Novel Coronavirus) pandemic. It's now more important than ever before that customers look
at data protection as a Tier-1 problem so that they can more nimbly move employees to
work from home without additional risk from human error and data loss." - Simon Taylor, CEO, HYCU, Inc.
"As we celebrate the importance of doing regular backups and ensuring data, applications and VMs are protected on World Backup Day, let’s not lose sight of the importance of recovery. As important as backups are, the ability to perform fast restores using snapshots or other preferred methods is critical. Even when the data is not on snapshots, but may reside on any local or remote backup targets which extends to cloud storage. This was one of the driving factors with a number of significant updates we provided to customers recently as we continue to evolve our backup and recovery solutions for both on-premises and public cloud users. At the end of this World Backup Day, you don’t just want to make sure backups run efficiently and complete on time, but that you can also have faster restores and zero anxiety especially in light of data loss situations." - Subbiah Sundaram, VP Products, HYCU, Inc.
--
"Data
protection is paramount to any business, which is why backup is now
more than ever a security play-supporting business continuity and risk
mitigation-and not only just a fundamental best practice for tech pros. In
today's data-heavy environment, backup should be part of all IT security teams'
data protection strategy--it's the backbone of a successful recovery plan when
disaster strikes and ensures data is available immediately with minimum
downtime. For this World Backup Day, I encourage tech pros to make sure their
backup solutions are 1) running consistently, 2) inclusive of all data located
anywhere from on-prem to cloud, 3) scalable to cover endpoints and
applications, 4) secure with controlled access to authorized users only, and 5)
working efficiently to enable tech pros to respond faster if something
goes wrong." - Tim Brown, VP of Security, SolarWinds
--
“Backup is something I take seriously; I have been working as a data protection specialist now for over 13 years. Therefore, World Backup Day is something I feel passionately about and is something I want to see people and companies embracing. Especially now, with so many lives and businesses turned upside down, having a backup of what’s most important personally and professionally is vital.
Humanity has created more information in the last two years than the entirety of recorded history. Every year over 2.5 exabytes of data is created. That figure will only continue to increase as more of our daily actions involve the creation of data. Your personal data footprint will undoubtedly contain photos, music, important personal projects, documentation, memories and more. Imagine though if you lost all of that? The equivalent of a modern-day house fire or the burning of the Library at Alexandria. What would you do if you lost everything?
Complete data loss is inevitably going to invoke a plethora of negative emotions and result in a lot of time attempting to see if you can salvage any of your digital heritage. And while losing everything is obviously a worst-case, if you haven’t got a backup, you’re only one hardware failure or one hack away from that dreaded scenario.” - William Bush, Senior Solutions Architect, Catalogic Software
--
"In my
30 year career building backup solutions, I have seen it go from "UNIX Backup
to tape" to a basket of serious innovation and very modern technologies. As IT
has evolved with virtualization, storage and cloud technologies, so has
backup. IT Professionals today have a much more complex task of maintaining
resiliency in their infrastructure with hundreds of applications running
on-premise, SaaS or in the Cloud. Backup is still the last line of defense when
there is a data loss issue due to user error, hardware failures or Ransomware. Companies can ensure
data stays safe by taking a holistic approach to protection, detection,
mitigation and recovery. That's the only true way to capitalize on the power of
information while minimizing business risk." - Deepak
Mohan, EVP, Enterprise Data Protection and Compliance, Veritas
--
"Backup is being put
into a new perspective with this year's World Backup Day. In light of the
current healthcare pandemic, not only a growing number of employees are working
outside the office, but we're seeing organizations enforce a work-from-home
policy for all employees. Even if workers are using cloud applications that do
not care where they are located, the files and data they share could be
anywhere, and this puts a glaring spotlight on new backup challenges for IT
teams.
First, even though work has changed for many, ransomware propagators are still
out there. In fact, we're now seeing "ransomware as a service," or in general
much more systematic methods for infecting organizations. Ransomware's impact
on organizations is no joke, companies need to manage their files and data, and
backup that data, in case ransomware causes a disruption.
Second, having a growing distributed workforce puts any organization at risk
when it comes to content sharing. If employees aren't using applications that
enable secure sharing (Microsoft OneDrive is an example), corporate content
could be left in the open when shared through online services, creating gaps in
data protection. Companies need to give their workforces a solution that can be
controlled and that offers visibility into what is being shared, where, and
with whom.
Beyond challenges created by a distributed workforce, driven by the need to
work remotely, we'll start to see more attention paid to backup of data
associated with containers this year, as containers continue to grow in
popularity. Particularly, companies will learn the importance of backup in this
space -- Yes, high availability can be built into container infrastructure, but
what do you do when you need to recover from a disaster? The process for
backing up containers and related data will be thought about differently than,
for example, virtual machines.
We're set to see more challenges this year, certainly with the current
conditions creating more opportunity for risk as much as changing technology
landscapes. What will be interesting going forward, as organizations that have
re-focused on their risk strategies in the current climate, will inevitably be
ensuring that their infrastructure and data are kept secure." -- Adrian Moir, Lead
Technology Evangelist at Quest Software's Data Protection business unit
--
"World Backup Day is an annual
reminder for both individuals and businesses to back up important data like
applications, photos and documents. Today is also a good time to assess your
backup strategy for this changing data landscape. With IoT, an increasingly
remote workforce, and SaaS applications, data center-based protection is no
longer sufficient. A modern data protection strategy must incorporate real-time
data from widespread locations, traditional workloads, cloud-native
applications and SaaS data. Meanwhile, with the expansion of regional privacy
regulations, organizations now need to back up more data in more places with
more regulations. Like the rest of IT, a successful backup group must now
leverage cloud and SaaS technology while building stronger relationships with
business and legal teams.
The future of backup has always been in the cloud. The good news is, the future
is here. Cloud backup is already the most secure, reliable and cost-effective
option to protect your data - wherever it lives." -- Stephen Manley, Chief
Technology, Druva
--
"World Backup Day champions
an important message for individuals-make sure your valuable information is
backed up in case the worst should happen. However, when you expand this
concept to a larger business or enterprise you quickly realize that, while
necessary, backups alone are useless in the event of a disaster.
Today, speed of recovery and how quickly you can get back online after an event
is a critical measure of business success - and requires a comprehensive
disaster recovery (DR) focused strategy. Backups are a great first step, but
they are not an effective DR strategy due to the sheer amount of time and
manual labor required to recover from traditional backups after a disaster.
Mass recovery was never the design goal of backup systems. Imagine 100TBs of
data stored in a backup system, which can restore at 500MB/sec (which is
generous). In a disaster scenario, it will take 2 plus days to copy the data
from the backup system into a primary storage system. In today's on-demand
economy, where we expect our IT systems to be always up and running two days of
downtime is unacceptable." - Sazzala Reddy,
co-founder and CTO, Datrium
--
"This World Backup Day, it may be time to consider the best ways to address rising costs and increasing regulations. The ability for cloud to scale up AND down supports a much more cost effective disaster recovery strategy. The cloud can also help with regulation as it helps organizations have more visibility and therefore allows them to learn more about the data that they have under management. Where is the data that is important to governance and compliance being stored? Do you know what it is? Where it is? How to find it? Having a cloud-based solution that can easily assist in this will overall reduce your costs and stay compliant because it lets you manage your data SMARTER." - Matthew Tyrer, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing, Commvault
"Although recovery readiness should always be top of mind, world backup day is the perfect time to reflect on your organization’s backup and recovery strategies and re-evaluate its effectiveness. Stay vigilant in the fight against ransomware and other security related events and work with vendors who regularly update the software with security fixes, expand their compliance certifications, bolster security measures, and automate hardening rules to protect you. Be an active defender of your data." - Ranga Rajagopalan, Vice President, Products, Commvault
"World Backup Day is a great way to remind companies to pause and ensure that their relevant data is protected, especially as the backup solution changes to meet business requirements. As with all other disciplines within infrastructure, it imperative to keep pace with an ever-evolving infrastructure landscape, particularly due to the increasing adoption of cloud and container solutions. It is because of this that reviewing, testing, and improving your backup solution should be a continuous activity all year round." - Mark Jow, Regional Vice President, Technical Services, Commvault
--
"World Backup Day is a great way to highlight how data management and protection are still so critical to everyone, especially when companies are digitally transforming their businesses. Data management and backup are ideally a significant consideration from the beginning of those initiatives, as it is far easier to do it in the planning stages rather than after the fact. Leveraging SaaS data protection services where it makes sense, like for Office 365 and endpoints such as laptops and desktops, can help ease the management burden moving forward as well." - David Ngo, Vice President, Metallic Products and Engineering
--
“The two big focuses for backup in 2020 have been availability and usability. People need to be able to access and use their data anytime, anywhere. This is even more true given recent events that have driven most of the workforce to work remotely. Now more than ever, organizations need a comprehensive backup strategy to ensure they can recover and remediate from downtime, whether stemming from a natural disaster, a ransomware attack or another crisis.
This World Backup Day, I encourage companies to consider innovative ways to protect their data at its endpoints while minimizing cost, simplifying the process and leveraging additional manageability capabilities. The best bet to succeed here is to focus on secondary data and the cloud. These assets will not only help reduce the load on production, but will truly make an organization’s data more usable, available and accessible, no matter where its workers are.” - Octavian Tanase, SVP for ONTAP at NetApp
--
“World Backup Day is not just a symbolic event but also a chance for us to reflect on how we, as a community, implement and operationalize backup and disaster recovery. In particular, given the increasing growth of cloud-native stacks based on Kubernetes, the explosion of micro services, and greater control having "shifted left" to developers, the right question to ask on this day is to see whether we are giving backup and platform teams the right tools to effectively scale in these highly dynamic environments.”
“As a concrete example, when working with hundreds of containerized applications with tens of thousands of components, any system deployed today needs to prioritize Day 2 operations of the backup platform itself to allow teams to scale with newer cloud-native workloads. This includes features such as developer self-service with RBAC, API-first interfaces for easier automation, self-repairing systems, and platform hooks for monitoring, alerting, and alerting. Most importantly, we need to up-level the backup management granularity from storage-related infrastructure (disks, VM-level constructs, etc.) to applications. This World Backup Day is a good time to re-evaluate current solutions and workflows to see if they are going to meet business needs for the next year and beyond and, if not, what the next step in the journey should be.” - Niraj Tolia, CEO, Kasten
--
“World Backup Day provides an opportunity for all organisations, both public and private, to revisit their backup strategies and determine if they are well positioned to overcome the latest threats. With backup data being the key element in data restoration and cyber criminals consequently specifically targeting this data in ransomware attacks, companies need to concentrate on protecting their backups. One of the most effective and also easiest strategies to block off attacks aimed at the backup is WORM (write once, read many). With WORM storage, the data is made immutable, meaning that once written, it cannot be either changed or deleted for a defined period of time. This way the malware won’t be able to encrypt the data and lock the victim out. In the event of a ransomware attack, organisations can restore the data from their backup through a simple recovery process. In previous years, WORM storage required specialised storage devices and a workflow that accommodated them. This has changed with the Object Lock feature for object storage, allowing for WORM functionality to be provided on enterprise storage systems, protecting data at the device level.” - Neil Stobart, vice president of Global System Engineering at Cloudian
--
“Over the past decade, we have seen data viewed as both a positive and a negative in terms of its contributions to society. Data has been described as both the new oil, but more recently also the new asbestos. And during this time so our relationship with backups has changed too. Once seen as nothing more than an expensive insurance policy, backups are now a source of business insight, test data for developers, a source for checking regulatory compliance, in some cases an antidote to ransomware, and more. Backups have evolved from simple data protection to a key enabler of data management on-premises and in the cloud; a much more strategically important role than its humble origins. So on this, the tenth anniversary of World Backup Day, it seems fitting to remind businesses that a backup is more than just a copy of a moment in time. Rather it is a positive foundation for a data-driven modern business.” -
Raj Dutt, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Cohesity##