Prevent loss from unexpected events like hardware failures, natural disasters, or cyberattacks. Today, March 31, is World Backup Day, a global initiative that encourages people and businesses to backup their important data. On this day, we remind everyone of the importance of data backup and urge them to take steps to protect their valuable information
Indeed, improperly stored data can have catastrophic, even fatal consequences. In fact, according to the US National Cyber Security Alliance, 60% of small businesses fold within 6 months of suffering a cyber attack. A threat that was once deemed as remote and exotic has now become an existential everyday occurrence. Against that backdrop, World Backup Day is an opportunity not only to highlight the necessity for backing up data, but also to examine backup strategies and ensure that your data is properly protected.
As such, here are a few best practices to keep in mind when implementing a robust backup strategy:
- Don’t Overlook the 3-2-1-1 – Organizations are advised to always keep three copies of data, two of which are stored locally but on different media, and one copy stored off-site. With ransomware attacks at an all time high, and other business continuity concerns like natural disasters, this industry best practice is essential to protect your critical data. This can be achieved with the new Veeam Data Platform, combined with Zadara’s Edge Cloud platform capabilities.
- Rapid Restore Capabilities – Rapid recovery is an essential component of business continuity planning and backup best practices. Your backups do you little good if you are unable to restore in a timely manner. Organizations should look for Remote Clone capabilities that enable a remote snapshot to be projected back to the primary site instantaneously with full read / write access. Zadara’s Object Storage with immutable backup allows data to be stored on separate media for restore.
- Immutability – The ability to have an immutable copy of your data is becoming increasingly important. In addition to protecting against adverse events like drive failure or unintentional data loss, the increase in malicious activity targeting companies’ data demands a backup strategy that can perfectly preserve your data in a way that leaves it unchangeable. Zadara Object Storage with immutability ensures data integrity by stopping stored objects from being deleted or overwritten during a specific retention timeframe.
- Continuous Backup – Organizations should increase the frequency of backups to multiple times per day, and ideally to be constantly backing up their data. As the amount of data increases along with the frequency of interaction with it, the state of your data can change drastically from one hour to the next. Thus, automatic, continuous, incremental backups to both on-premises and off-site remote storage are cornerstones in any modern backup strategy.
- Consider Your Containers – Not all backup solutions are created equal. For those developing and deploying applications in Kubernetes environments, specialty backup solutions exist that protect the data without interfering with the performance of the system. Specifically, backing up Kubernetes VM’s with Kasten can make the difference between an efficient environment and a massive headache for developers.
By recognizing and participating in World Backup Day, individuals and businesses can take important steps to protect their valuable data from unexpected events such as hardware failures, natural disasters, or cyberattacks. By backing up important data, we can all have peace of mind knowing that our information is safe and secure. So how does your backup strategy stack up?
