With World Backup Day fast approaching, it is as important as ever to recognise the importance of backing up and protecting your data.
According to the World Backup Day website, 21% of people have never made a backup – a particularly concerning figure given 30% of all computers are already infected with malware. These figures are a stark reminder of the need to put backups at the forefront of every business leader’s mind; it is time to take action on data protection.
Making backups of collected data is vitally important in data management. Backups help to protect against human errors, hardware failure, virus attacks, among a myriad of other threats, while helping organisations to save time and money if these failures occur.
Keeping backups offline and offsite
Nowadays, businesses rely so heavily on data that it is quite simply impossible to continue operating without it – hence the vital need for it to be stored as securely as possible. As highlighted by Bob Fine, Quantum Senior Analyst Relations Manager, the LTO Program, “In a crisis – such as a cyberattack or a natural disaster – a backup of these data stores must be secure, safe, and recoverable to ensure that the IT teams can get the business back up and running as quickly as possible. The longer it takes to restore the backup, the greater the consequences, including both financial and reputational losses.”
“The best protection that businesses can give their backups is to keep at least two copies, one offline and the other offsite”, continues Fine. “By keeping one offline, an airgap is created between the backup and the rest of the IT environment. Should a business be the victim of a cyberattack, the threat physically cannot spread into the backup as there’s no connection to enable this daisy-chain effect. By keeping another copy offsite, businesses can prevent the backup suffering due to the same disaster (such as flooding or wildfires) as the main office.”
Rethinking virtualisation strategies
A debate that is currently being seen in the backup industry is around agent-based versus agentless backups. As noticed by Bruce Kornfeld, Chief Product Officer at StorMagic, “In recent years agentless backup has become more popular, especially for virtual environments, because it doesn’t require backup agent software to be installed on each virtual server. With more complex environments than ever before, having agents on each virtual machine (VM) can add administrative overhead to an IT department (from the need to keep all of the agents updated). The biggest players in virtualisation software – VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix – have all worked with many of the backup software providers over the years to develop custom integrations for agentless backup. It’s become the norm.”
However, Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware caused many customers to start rethinking their virtualisation strategies, potentially looking elsewhere for hypervisor solutions. Kornfield explains that “moving to a virtualisation solution outside of these ‘big 3’ means considering a more open, agent-based approach to backup. The backup software providers don’t have the resources to work with alternative hypervisor providers to do the custom engineering work needed for agentless backup integration.”
He adds that IT departments should “simply shift to an agent-based approach. This is how backup has been done for decades and, crucially, will work with any hypervisor. All backup software providers have agents available that typically deliver the same functionality as agentless for the same cost, making it a very valuable alternative with the flexibility and ROI that today’s businesses require.”
The impact of AI
The repercussions of AI are being felt across the whole technology landscape, and data backups are no exception. Glenn Akester, Technology & Innovation Director – Networks & Security at Node4, recognises how organisations have faced challenges in backing up their data, including due to growing data volumes and infrastructures being dispersed across multiple different environments.
He believes that AI may only increase backup difficulty; “These challenges are only set to grow as more organisations embrace AI and in doing so, create and process even more data. Intensifying data requirements and necessitating efficient organisation, classification, and storage, businesses will need to refine their backup strategies, deciding which data to store, how often, and in which mediums. Automation and orchestration will become increasingly vital to handle the sheer scale of backup and restore operations. As AI develops, organisations should see it as an opportunity to re-evaluate and update their entire data management, backup and recovery strategies, ensuring alignment with both operational needs and future growth.”
“Alongside the challenges that AI brings, organisations are also battling a rise in cyber threats and sophistication” furthers Akester. “As such, traditional backup best practices remain important. Measures like encryption (in transit and at rest), strong access controls, immutable or write-once storage, and air-gapped or physically separated backups help defend against increasingly sophisticated threats. To ensure true resilience, backups must be tested regularly. Testing confirms that the data is recoverable, helps teams understand the recovery process, and verifies recovery speeds, whilst supporting good governance and risk management.”
Terry Storrar, Managing Director, Leaseweb UK, agrees that the impact of AI cannot be ignored; “With the move towards a future of AI-driven technologies, the amount of data we generate and use is set to increase exponentially. With data often containing valuable information, any loss or impact could have devastating consequences.”
He emphasises the importance of World Backup Day, recognising that it “serves as a much-needed reminder that we must take a proactive role in protecting our data. Having regular, secure backups is an essential part of any personal or business data strategy. It’s about creating layers of protection to ensure that if something goes wrong, your data isn’t lost forever. A good backup plan not only involves using cloud storage but also local backups that are stored offline to safeguard against cyberattacks. This World Backup Day, let’s remember that backups are not just an afterthought, not just a ‘good-to-have’ – they’re a critical part of our digital lives.”
