World Backup Day consideration — why celebrate?

What you can do to celebrate World Backup Day? Does it even matter?

Individuals and IT departments can benefit from spending a few minutes thinking about data protection this week. But this thought process should be active throughout the whole year, as threats are continuing to rise in volume and variation.

Tips to learn from World Backup Day, and apply for the whole year

• Test your current backup solution. Is it working? Are the backups current? Are you backing up all of your important data?

>See also: Hybrid cloud and blockchain solutions will be the future for data backup

• Think about the common ways you might lose data. Theft, hardware failure, natural disaster, malicious attack, user error, etc. Are you protected from these incidents?
• Talk to your friends and colleagues about the importance of data backup. Help them protect themselves.
• If you do not have a data protection strategy for your company, take steps to create one.

“A profound backup and disaster recovery strategy should not be a stepchild in times of global ransomware threats, because this virtually invisible safety net is absolutely critical for business continuity in an emergency,” said Stefan Schachinger, EMEA consulting engineer for data protection at Barracuda Networks. “Especially when the backup systems are fragmented, i.e. two or more different backup solutions are used, and often across several locations, the systems are often prone to errors and difficult to test.”

“In addition, such fragmented strategies can make it difficult to recover lost files in a disaster recovery scenario within a reasonable time frame. Companies often have problems meeting their self-defined targets for RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).”

>See also: Why World Backup Day continues to be important

“The lack of a consolidated strategy is certainly one reason for this. Public cloud backup and disaster recovery technologies provide organisations with a robust disaster recovery tool to reduce recovery times and ensure the availability of critical services. As a consolidated solution, they are easy to test, provide high reliability in an emergency and protect against data loss due to disasters or security threats such as ransomware”.

Regardless of whether you plan on ‘celebrating’ World Backup Day on Saturday, make sure backup practices are at the forefront of your mind all year round.

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Nick Ismail

Nick Ismail is a former editor for Information Age (from 2018 to 2022) before moving on to become Global Head of Brand Journalism at HCLTech. He has a particular interest in smart technologies, AI and...