In an age where backups are no longer enough, what are some key reminders organizations need to keep the lights on?
Despite organizations taking additional measures to protect their employees and infrastructures in the past two years, cybercriminals have set their sight on the lifeblood of most business operations – their data.
With significant data breaches and ransomware attacks in the headlines last year, data loss is the worst-case scenario for any organization today.
There’s never been a greater imperative to take data backup and recovery seriously – and World Backup Day on 31st March is a timely reminder for all of us.
Industry experts share their thoughts here…
Ee Laine Koh, Senior Technical Consultant, Commvault:
“Data protection and storage technology have evolved significantly through the decades. From bulky tapes to in-house servers and now onto the cloud, backup and recovery continues to be the cornerstone of organizations both big and small.”
“Data today is both valuable and vulnerable amidst increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats. A robust and comprehensive data management strategy that manages and protects corporate data wherever it lives will help to mitigate cyber risks and provide a recovery readiness that is key for organizations to thrive amidst our rapid digitalization.”
Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director, Asia South and Pacific Region, Veritas Technologies:
“It’s clear that multi-cloud adoption is delivering big benefits to enterprises around the globe, including enhanced resiliency and agility. However, the shift to multi-cloud environments is also creating new data management challenges, such as unexpected costs, operational complexity and increased vulnerability to ransomware threats.”
“Bad actors are successfully making their ransomware attacks even more impactful by targeting cloud services and data, and as the volume of enterprise cloud data continues to grow exponentially, we expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future.”
“World Backup Day 2022 is a powerful reminder that there has never been a more critical time for all organizations to prioritize robust data protection practices. Leaders must work with their IT teams to take the necessary steps NOW to implement the right tools and protocols that can autonomously self-provision, self-optimize and self-heal data management services to keep their critical data safe and available no matter where it is – from edge to core to cloud.”
Chua Hock Leng, VP of ASEAN and Greater China, Pure Storage:
“In 2022, ransomware is continuing to wreak havoc across the globe. With organizations of all sizes storing increasing volumes of sensitive customer data, there is no place for a ‘it won’t happen to me’ mindset. Leaders need to be thinking of the worst-case scenario and prepare for rapid recovery after an attack.”
“Unfortunately, while backup systems have provided an insurance policy against an attack in the past, hackers are now trying to breach these too. Once an attacker is inside an organization’s systems, they will attempt to find credentials to immobilize backups. This will make it more difficult, time consuming and potentially expensive to restore.”
“Organizations need a two-pronged strategy: advanced, immutable snapshots of their data and an ability to not just backup fast but to restore fast and at scale. Immutable snapshots are protected because they can’t be eradicated, modified or encrypted – even if an attacker gains access to sensitive data. They are also relatively easy to restore, but depending upon how much data needs to be restored, snapshots might not be a viable option.”
“Traditional tape or disk-based backup can restore roughly one to two terabytes an hour. That’s not going to cut it for most organizations. Some Flash-based solutions can offer speeds of up to 270TB an hour and are needed to get an organization up and running with minimal negative impact.”
“With a multi-faceted cybersecurity strategy reinforced with snapshots and a rapid restore solution, the restoration phase after a ransomware attack can be reduced from several weeks to just a few hours. This will minimize the impact on users, customers and potential reputational damage suffered from being offline for a prolonged period of time.”
Rajesh Awasthi, Vice President & Global Head of Managed Hosting and Cloud 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. Enterprises need to define this from a three-fold perspective:
- Move your storage and recovery to the cloud, which offers scalability, accessibility, reliability, performance, and most importantly, security and backup at scale, better than any other technology.
- Choose your vendors carefully, evaluating them on three aspects: their network, their infrastructure, and their security practices. For instance, vendors with data centers geographically dispersed, or committed to sharing their security audit results with the customers, are more trustworthy.
- Have a robust backup strategy. A holistic data protection strategy needs to go beyond just preventing or warding off data loss; it is crucial to have a strong, always-on backup process in place that 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.”
Dave Russell, VP, Enterprise Strategy, Veeam Software:
“World Backup Day reminds us that backup matters! Backup matters because so many things are taking down servers: ransomware, human accidents, and software and hardware failures. Out of these, ransomware is one of the most pertinent and when it strikes, it’s more often than people think.
“The Veeam Data Protection Report 2022 found that when organizations across APJ have to recover, they only recover 65% of their data on average. Losing one-third (35%) of their data is simply not good enough.”
“Backup and recovery solutions are essential foundations of any organization’s Modern Data Protection strategy. 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.”
“Backup matters. On this April Fool’s eve, don’t be foolish – back up your data!”
