The Importance of Taking the World Backup Day Pledge

The Sophistication in Simplicity

Backups of data storage are certainly simple in theory but what about the entry of cloud. Having a protected set of data in another physical location protects a business against ransomware, unexpected application crashes, server problems and accidental erasure/human error. Savvy IT leaders all know that a modern data protection strategy means much more than simply employing a random solution to an arbitrary storage target. Cloud backup solutions are growing because of this.

Today, the average enterprise requires a backup solution at the scale of a petabyte or more. Conventional storage techniques are teetering on the edge of their limitations at this point, and the amount of space that is needed will only continue to grow. As it does, the cost will also move past the point of sustainability for traditional backup strategies. With this in mind, organizations of all sizes should take their backups very seriously.

Technology decision makers across the board agree that a backup solution should include an exhaustive examination of a company’s data and the tools available to that company to organize and manage that data. Alongside that, what are the needs of particular data workloads? A thorough planning will bring answers. From this perspective, a company can create a data recovery strategy that delivers in all situations, reducing the effects of even the most catastrophic occurrence.

Welcome to World Backup Day. This is the day that companies should use to discuss every bit of the above strategy.

So How Can You Leverage World Backup Day to Examine Your Backup Strategy?

Assess your current situation

• When was the last time you backed up? In order to be effective, backups must be recent.
• When was the last time you tested your backups? Just because it worked yesterday does not mean that it will work today.
• Where are you backing up to? Is the location quarantined so that it cannot be affected if your primary security is breached?
• What do you back up? You should prioritize your data and infrastructure to focus on the most important information first.
• Do you have different backup scenarios for different workloads? Different workloads cannot optimize function under the same scenario.
• Can you restore your files easily? Backing up your files is only half the battle. The other half is retrieval within a timeframe that is acceptable to your customer base.

If you cannot answer these questions easily, then you should dig deep into the strategies that your company currently employs.

Here Are Some Best Practices You Can Use To Improve Your Backup System

• Back up your important data several times a day and ensure that these backups were successful.
• Use the 3-2-1 backup rule. 3 copies of your data on two different media with one off-site copy. At this point, this is a standard everyone should live by.
• Eliminate the human element as much as possible – automate using AI driven processes so that simple mistakes are not made.

Automation Should Be Your Best Friend. Why?

• Your teams should be able to innovate without having to spend time on continually maintaining a backup environment. They have more important things to do, and backup automation gives them the time to do it.
• Humans make mistakes. When you can take the human element out of maintenance or updates it decreases the chances that a simple mistake, can create larger issues.

Backup as a Service (BaaS) Allows You to Get to Your Data without Upsetting Your Internal Processes

• Make your backup process invisible to the company. No one should notice backups are taking place – kind of like you don’t notice your own breathing.
• Use secondary storage, trying to use top tier storage for all your data is just throwing money to the wind. Create a strategy that will help your company in the continuing expansion of a data enabled world.

Patrick Rogers, VP of marketing and product management at Cohesity, poignantly said: “No company should underestimate how important backups are. However, blindly creating data copies is just a waste of time that no company can really afford. Instead, companies must leverage data in backup copies for a bevy of things that can include test/dev, file services and analytics. This consolidated approach to secondary storage allows IT decision makers to involve backups in a broader, more efficient data ecosystem.

World Backup Day is a reminder of this more sophisticated backup strategy as the only viable option for companies. The costs for escalating data increase almost in real time, and storing data for an enterprise level company can cost these organizations as much as $891 billion by 2020. There is no reason to pay this kind of money when better solutions are so readily available.

Additionally, simply investing in more storage capacity as data grows over time is not the answer either. 41 percent of files that companies hold have not been modified in the past three years. It costs a company $20.5 million per annum to manage this admittedly redundant information in a 10PB storage environment, with the added weight of retaining data and potentially slowing down operations.

The majority of organizations today will struggle with the exponential growth of data. These companies are struggling because they are hoarding all of the data that they possibly can. They are doing this irrespective of the actual value of the data, playing on the probability that the data will somehow be needed at a future time. It is a great use of World Backup Day to get away from this cycle. Today is a golden opportunity to assess company data and prioritize what is business critical before initiating any backup process. This allows a company to delete any data that does not hold any current business value. Organizations will not only cut storage costs for themselves, but they will also optimize the availability and overall business value of the data that is kept and prioritized.