Today, Thursday 31 March, is the fifth annual World Backup Day, a day where storage and data experts unite to remind everyone how important data backup is. Although positive steps have been made in the five years since Backup Day’s inception, some businesses are still potentially seconds from disaster.
A recent 123-Reg survey found that 1 in 10 small business owners never backed up data, with 53.45% only performing data back up once a month or less frequently. These findings are of a real concern when you take into account the rise of the always-on enterprise and rising consumer demands.
The Ann Winbald quote that ‘data is the new oil’ has never been so pertinent and, with that in mind, CBR asked the experts what businesses large and small need to be aware of today, on World Backup Day.
Why World Backup Day is so important
John Michael CEO, iStorage, said:
"One of the reasons why World Backup Day is so important, and a key reason as to why iStorage supports the initiative, is that the EU will soon have the power to fine companies €20 million or 4% of their annual turnover if they are found to be in breach of the soon to be General Data Protection Regulation. This regulation enforces any business that holds data on EU Citizens to implement adequate security measures to protect data from loss or theft.
"Encryption is the best form of security, rendering the data unintelligible to any unauthorised access, GDPR also promotes encryption as an essential tool for backing up data. As such, it is going to become more important than ever before for companies to ensure that they are taking adequate steps to protect their sensitive and business-critical data."
How and Where
Mohit Aron, CEO, Cohesity, said:
"Everyone knows the importance of backing up your data, especially enterprises, but what’s even more critical is the ‘how’ and ‘where.’ Backing up data should be part of a comprehensive secondary storage strategy rather than a siloed solution to avoid redundant copies that waste resources and create unnecessary management complexity.
"Consolidating all secondary storage use cases, including backup, test/dev, and file services, helps enterprises maximize IT resources to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and gain a full picture of their data assets."
Backup is no longer enough
Giri Fox, Director of Technical Services, Rackspace, said:
"The rapid increase in the amount of data that consumers and organisations store is one of the biggest challenges facing the backup industry. Organisations aren’t always sure what data they should be keeping, so to make sure they don’t discard any important data they sometimes end up keeping everything which adds to this swell of data.
"For many companies, a simple backup tool is no longer enough to make sure all these company assets are safe and available, they need support in keeping up with the sheer scale of data and to fix problems when a valuable file or database goes missing.
Going data blind
Bob Plumridge, EMEA CTO, Hitachi Data Systems, said:
"Managing the huge increases in the volume of data flowing through a business each day is a huge challenge for IT teams, and as the guardians of information, businesses are looking to IT departments to navigate where their data currently resides and interpret how it can be used. The issue for IT teams is that they are going in data blind. Often data isn’t classified at the point of creation, leaving businesses with no way of knowing whether they are looking at HR, sales or customer data.
"With the majority of data holding little to no value, the importance of classification is paramount to ensure businesses retain the crucial 20 per cent. Finding the right balance in predicting what might be deemed important in the future and today’s regulatory, storage requirements are a hurdle that organisations are increasingly tackling."
Availability is the new backup
Richard Agnew, VP NW EMEA, Veeam, said:
"Driving backup awareness amongst consumers is still important, but for today’s enterprises, backup alone is no longer relevant, or enough. Organisations have discovered that the question is no longer, "Are we backed up?" but instead, "Are we available?" Backup as it is traditionally known is being replaced by a new category: Availability.
"We’re seeing an ‘Availability Gap’ (the gulf between what IT can deliver and what users demand) in today’s organisations characterised by data loss, long recovery times, lack of visibility, and unreliable data protection. In fact, every year, application downtime is costing businesses $16 million in lost revenue and productivity. 59% of businesses in our research reveal that they experience unplanned downtime caused by IT failures, external forces, or other factors up to ten times a year at the cost of up to $100,266 per hour. It’s clear that this is hitting the bottom line, not to mention leaving a lasting impact on customer confidence (68%) and damage to brand integrity (62%).
