Celebrate The World's Backup Day by protecting your data

Established in 2011 World's Backup Day is to remind people that backing up their data can help them in future. The World's backup day is strategically celebrated just before April fool's Day to make people aware that prevention is better than cure. The main aim of the day is to encourage people to regularly back-up their data. If any data is lost, the whole organization suffers.

Data loss is not a question of “if” it happens to you or not but the question is “when”. And when it happens, what do you do?. Pankaj Sabnis, Principal Architect, Cloud Computing, Infogain says “Data is the backbone of any organization big or small and the loss or misuse of this data can have serious impact on the credibility and economic health of the company. Nowadays secure and affordable backup solutions are available for timely and effective data backup and protection of data. Industry statistics suggest that a company that loses access to its critical data for more than 48 hours is likely be put out of business within one year. Data backup allows for quick and successful data recovery and prevents the misuse of critical business data. Data is the most valuable asset for any organization today and a secure backup enables us to safeguard the same.”

Do we need to back up everything?

Balaji Rao, Managing Director-India Veritas says "when it comes to backup, simply investing in ever-greater storage capacity is not the answer. Recent research found that 41% of files hadn’t been modified in the past three years. In a 10PB storage environment, it would cost in the region of $20.5 mn per year to manage and retain 41% stale, redundant data."

Companies need to understand the amount and type of data which they plan to store. Once this is decided then they can look for solutions as to how to store it, whether to build on-premise solutions, moving to cloud or combination of both.

Is cloud storage a good place for backup?

Storing data on cloud has changed the way people use backup these days, but according to reports, it shouldn’t be the only place for storage.

All data is not equally created and hence needs to have different back-up. So before storing data, one need to ask themselves the following questions:

 How soon do I need the data back if lost?

 How fast do I need to access the data?

 How secure does it need to be?

 How long do I need to retain data?

Once you get the answers for the above questions, you will be able to get a better back-up, storage facility for your organization.

Why is backup so important?

One major concern of any IT head/CIO is to securely store data. In the event of a data loss either due to a virus attack, cyber attack, hardware failure or natural disaster, the data might be lost permanently if it is not properly backed up or stored.

Security is the first priority while managing data in any IT environment. Since the IT environments are virtually and physically concerned, it is recommended that the data is encrypted. It will bar unwanted people from misusing the data. "Today, most organizations struggle with exponential data growth. Many are hoarding every scrap of data, irrespective of value, on the off-chance it is needed in the future. Businesses should use World Backup Day to break this cycle. It is an opportunity to review data and determine what is business critical before backing it up, while deleting data that doesn’t drive business value. This will help organizations cut storage costs, while maximizing the availability and business value of useful data” added Rao.