The software and technology industry celebrates World Backup Day on March 31 every year. This day marks the significance of data backup for businesses and organisations worldwide.
World Backup Day: Here’s what some industry experts say:
Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President, Veeam Software – India & SAARC It is evident that the dependency of businesses on data, and the amount of data generated by them is consistently growing. This is creating new challenges for organisations of all sizes, making them even more vulnerable to cyberattacks. According to Veeam Data Protection Report 2022, 84% of Indian organizations suffered ransomware attacks, making cyber-attacks one of the single biggest causes of downtime for the second consecutive year. The report also found that Indian organizations were unable to recover 36% of their lost data on average and 90% of organizations were unable to recover at least some of the data they had lost. Hence, it is essential that businesses have a comprehensive data backup plan in place to be fully prepared at the time of a data breach. That’s not all! Only backing up may not protect your data from ransomware – it is equally important to ensure that the backup is well protected and securely stored. Organizations need to ensure their data protection capabilities keep pace with the demands of their business, to close the gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage versus how frequently data is backed up.
The good news is that we’re seeing CXOs acknowledge the urgent need for Modern Data Protection. And investing in such technologies goes beyond providing peace of mind, ensuring business continuity and maintaining customer confidence.”
Ripu Bajwa, Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies India
In today’s era of accelerated change and digital transformation, businesses in every sector need to do more with less. With businesses in India running workloads in a hybrid environment, it is critical to securely store data in multiple spaces like databases, file servers, and network-attached storage (NAS). While considering a solution that gives businesses the flexibility to access, upload, protect and analyse data, an asset that will have the advantage of long-term retention, reporting and insight into cloud storage use, will serve Indian organisations better.
Data use and storage have undergone dynamic changes. According to the Dell Technologies APEX Backup Services study, 65% of IT decision-makers lack confidence that they will recover all systems or data to meet SLOs following a data loss. An as-a-Service model can be a redefining solution for businesses across where an enterprise solution provider manages their data needs while they focus on business growth. 25% of IT decision-makers indicate that database or data management workloads are a good fit for the as-a-Service model.
As a global leader in data protection solutions, Dell Technologies’ enterprise backup solutions can protect everything from laptops and other edge devices to the largest enterprise data centre, along with data and applications residing in on-premises infrastructure, and virtualized environments including public, private and hybrid clouds. With many options for backup storage, backup software, integrated appliances and data protection and recovery solutions, Dell Technologies makes it easy to implement powerful tools for backup, recovery, data archiving and data replication that can help to protect business-critical data, improve uptime and ensure data availability. Dell Technologies’ new SaaS-based Apex Backup Services offers end-to-end scalable, secure data protection with centralised monitoring and management for SaaS applications, endpoints and hybrid workloads.
This World Backup Day should be a welcome opportunity for businesses to reconsider their storage solutions and upgrade to safer cloud environments secured by cutting-edge data protection amenities, which will support their digital transformation journey.
Kumar Vembu, CEO and Founder of Gofrugal
Data is the new oil, said a sane soul. The only difference is that oil would run out in a few years. Data, on the other hand, keeps getting accumulated exponentially. With more than 50% of the world’s population using smart-phones and digital devices, with new ones adding day by day, there are massive amounts of data created.
We walk, talk, eat, drink and breathe data. We are constantly leaving behind digital footprints. More so, when we engage with online platforms and are engrossed with digital channels. What most of us fail to notice, far less comprehend, is the lurking dangers and sneaking threats that we invite unintentionally. We hardly realise the growing platforms using AI + data to understand our choices and apprehend our preferences, and use our own personal information to create personalised experiences.
It’s time we all woke up to the realities and compulsions of data protection at large. It’s not just about data backup and restore methods, but it’s also about freeing businesses from digital slavery. It is the capacity to decide what data should be stored, how it should be used or not used, and to make sure it doesn’t make us enslaved by hardware and enchained by software.
It’s not just individuals who are unaware and unprotected. Over, 90% of small and medium size retail and distribution businesses are not aware of the impact of data protection. According to a global survey by a cybersecurity firm, 57% of organisations suffered unexpected downtime last year because of data loss. The findings also revealed that while 91% of individuals backup data and devices, 68% still lose data because of hardware or software failures, out-of-date backup, power fluctuations, theft or accidental deletion. The backup methods are not regular and sometimes even a day’s or week’s day is lost because of manual methods.
This World Backup day, businesses need to understand and commit to the importance of data backup and enjoying freedom of sharing data in a secure environment. It is high time the world moves from celebrating backup day to daily backup.
Anshuman Rai, Area Vice President, India & South Asia, Commvault
The alarming rate of ransomware attacks has put cyber hygiene and data management at the centre of all businesses. In fact, the virtual-first approach leading to collaborative technology and increasing cloud adoption has redefined the role of CIOs. The value of data safe keeping, regular backups, cloud data protection of workloads in your cloud and multi-cloud environments hold the key for businesses to be future-ready and drive maximum value in the digital world.
One of the most vital elements of data protection is how quickly lost data can be recovered, thus, emphasizing the importance of World Backup Day. Today serves as an annual reminder to get data backups in order, so that when the worst does happen, the data can be recovered quickly without seriously impacting business continuity.
Businesses must identify the desired outcome to smartly backup their data. To achieve this, they must consider the recovery requirements and evaluate the market trends and solutions best suited for their needs. For instance, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have become very popular in India due to its cost effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility, enabling users to roll out data protection capabilities quickly and smoothly, backup data while avoiding the expensive of building and maintaining tailor-made data protection solutions.
Rajesh Awasthi, Vice President & Business Head, Global – Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Tata communications
Data losses can occur in many ways, from hard drive failures or cyber-attacks to human error or theft. Research by Acronis shows that just 13% of IT users and professionals follow backup best practices – leaving critical gaps in their data recovery and security strategy. Additionally, 73% of IT users have lost data at least once, suggesting the need to backup or recover properly.
On World Backup Day 2022, these numbers hold significant importance and serve as a reminder to IT leaders to update their data protection and recovery practices to keep pace with the cybersecurity landscape in 2022 – the third year in which we’re navigating a distributed and ever-changing world of work. The enterprises need to define this from a three-fold perspective:
1) Move your storage and recovery to the cloud – Businesses need to evolve from backing their data up to tapes or managing it onsite to be more efficient and cost-effective. Cloud offers scalability, accessibility, reliability, performance, and most importantly, security and backup at a scale, better than any other technology
2) Choose your vendors carefully – The vendors should be evaluated on three aspects: their network, their infrastructure and their security practices. For e.g., vendors with data centres geographically dispersed, or committed to sharing their security audit results with the customers, are more trustworthy
3) Have a robust backup strategy – For a holistic data protection strategy, it needs to go beyond just preventing or warding off data loss, it is crucial to have a strong, always-on backup process in place which guarantees at least 99.9% uptime and shares exhaustive reporting, providing full visibility
Given that the average cost of a data breach is higher today with remote work being a major contributor, it is imperative that enterprises invest the time and money into ensuring their protection and backup strategies are at par with the rest of their digital transformation strategy, and not an afterthought.
Balaji Rao, Country Manager – India & SAARC, Mandiant
In the recent past, organizations across the globe have experienced cyber security attacks that impacted their businesses through loss of revenue and brand reputation. To mitigate these risks, companies must develop disaster recovery and backup plans that will help them re-establish business promptly in the event of an attack. Last year, Mandiant released its M-Trends report that highlighted some of the processes that companies must keep in mind for effective backup and restoration as follows:
- Clear delineation of responsibility for managing and verifying data and application backups.
- Alignment of backup and restoration processes with business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
- Online and offline data backup retention policies, including initiation, frequency, verification and testing (for both on-premises and cloud-based data).
- Backup infrastructure that was segmented within the environment and only accessible using dedicated accounts for interfacing with and managing backup platforms and storage
According to the recent Mandiant predictions report, it was observed that the APJ region will witness an increase in breaches made public by attackers. Businesses have to re-imagine their network security and prioritize their critical data, application, and services. Security incidents require diligent preparation, rapid action and critical asset protection. The Mandiant Advantage Platform offers automated defense against active breaches, intel monitoring, alert investigation and prioritization and response and remediation. This helps organizations get back to business after a security incident and secure their valuable data. Mandiant frontline expertise helps organizations transform their cyber defense capabilities to mitigate threats and reduce business risk before, during and after an incident.
