World Back Up Day
March 31st has been declared World Backup Day. A few years ago this independent initiative started to raise awareness about backups and data preservation. With so much of our business and personal lives being stored in digital form, it is important that we ensure we can always access that data if anything goes wrong.
People now create and generate over 1.8 zettabytes of data per year. That’s a lot of data that we need to protect! Unfortunately, nearly 30% of people have never even backed up their data. Backing up your data will protect your life's work when that hard drive fails. If you are a business, a data backup can be what saves your company.
Today brings many challenges when it comes to data, the biggest being it gets everywhere!
Gone are the days when we could have a tape or USB drive attached to the server, that backs up once a night and you're ok.
2020 saw the world move to remote working, many away from the server in the office. A lot of businesses have got rid of servers completely! But that doesn't mean your data is safe.
Data when stored in Office 365, Google Workspace or Dropbox still has to be protected and backed up. Unfortunately they don't do it for you. Microsoft call it the "shared responsibility model"
So it might be on a server, in the cloud (a server somewhere else), on a users desktop, or even on their mobile phone. We need to think about where we have data, and how we protect it, no matter what.
And it's not just protecting it, what good is a backup if it takes a week to recover? Most companies need access to their data instantly or at least within an hour.
Disasters have changed too.
We used to worry about flood, fire and theft. What would happen if you're building burnt down or your equipment was stolen. But now there's a much bigger threat that causes disasters, cyber criminals.
Cyber criminals usually don't care about you, or your data, they have zero interest in it. Unless they're working for nation state organizations and most people we deal with aren't under attack from China or Russia. They don't care, but you do, and they know that you will pay them money to get that data back if they take it from you. It's all about money.
So you can be Bob the Builder sole trader or Barclays Bank, they don't discriminate.
The other disaster we rarely think of is mistakes, everyone makes them. Accidentally deleting files happens all the time, or have you ever saved and overwritten the wrong file? Sometimes its a simple undo. Other times it requires a data recovery. Even Pixar accidentally lost nearly 90% of Toy Story 2 to a wrong computer command!
Finally, do you have a backup procedure in place? If you don’t, consider making a plan to protect and restore your data. You should also check (and then recheck) your backup restores on World Backup Day to see if they actually work. After all, a backup plan that doesn't work isn't much of a backup plan!
Join us on World Back Up Day for our free interactive webinar.
On Wednesday 31st at 10am we'll be joined by business backup and disaster recovery experts Datto for an interactive webinar.
Over the hour we'll look at:
- Todays Business & Technology Challenges
- Disasters - what happens when everything goes wrong
- How to prepare for worst case scenario
- Want to see a live disaster? - We'll show you what happens when a cyber criminal gets in to your systems and takes control of your data.
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