World Backup Day helps shine a light on the topic of backup, which often gets very little attention in many computing environments. Many do not want to take responsibility for the backup system, because they understand how difficult the job can be. Backup isn’t as interesting as Kubernetes or a well-tuned database that helps increase the revenue or profitability of your company. Backup simply doesn’t go “above the fold” as they say in web and newspaper circles. It’s not big news – until it is.
Backup – or more accurately, the lack thereof – became a topic that fueled big headlines in the last 24 months. I’m thinking of large ransomware attacks where the inability of the backup system to quickly recover the data was a major part of the story. I’m also thinking of the destruction of an entire data center in France, after which it was discovered that their backup system appeared to be stored inside the same data center. Finally, I’m thinking of a major data loss event caused by human error from a vendor claiming to have a cloud backup service.
Cyber resilience takes center stage in 2022
No one cares if you can back up; they only care if you can restore. The question I want you to ask yourself this year is how resilient is your backup system? How capable is it of surviving natural disasters, cyber attacks, and the oldest IT problem of them all – human errors. Your backup system must be resilient against all of these things. Is it?
Let’s talk about human error, like when someone at the cloud backup vendor mentioned above accidentally deleted an “array of redundant servers.” So many questions. How do you delete an array of redundant servers? How redundant were they if a single mistake could delete all of them? Why was anyone manually doing anything like that in the first place? No one in Druva is ever provisioning or decommissioning backup servers, starting with the fact that we don’t have backup servers to decommission. All infrastructure needed for a given backup set is always automatically provisioned by our cloud-native platform. No one in Druva has the ability to do what this vendor did to their customer data; Druva removes the human touch from the equation as much as possible. How protected is your backup system from human error? If someone accidentally deleted some backups, can you recover them?
You must also be resilient against cyber attacks. We know a little something about that at Druva because we’ve helped dozens of our customers successfully restore from cyber attacks. Are your backups susceptible to ransomware? Are they stored in a file system directly accessible by a server? That server can be compromised by privilege escalation or a piece of ransomware spreading through your environment using protocols like SMB and RDP.
You can no longer ignore the backup system when it comes to cybersecurity; in fact, I would argue it probably needs to be front and center. It is your last line of defense and if it is gone, you’re a castle with no moat or walls.
Natural disasters and physical terrorist attacks are the easiest to protect from in a modern data resiliency system. Simply ensure that all of your backups are stored in a different place than what you are protecting, and design a disaster recovery system to recover after such an event. Druva’s customers can restore their entire VMware and AWS environments in 15 to 20 minutes, regardless of the number of VMs they’re restoring. They also have high confidence in the resiliency of their DR system because they can repeatedly test it as much as they like.
Key takeaways
Celebrate World Backup Day by making an action plan for your company and your data. Take an inventory of your environment to ensure that everything is being backed up. Do a test recovery of every unique part of your infrastructure (e.g. Oracle, SQL Server, AWS, Microsoft 365, etc.). Make sure that all of your backups work the way you think they work. Finally, ask yourself how resilient your backup system is. Could a single human error take out your entire backup environment? Could ransomware attack your backups and delete them or encrypt them? Celebrate World Backup Day by making your backups more resilient.
The best time to boost the cyber resilience of your backups is now. Druva delivers data protection, security, and governance across backups that support business resilience and compliance. Learn more about Druva for cyber resilience with a live demo and free trial. See first-hand how easy it is to boost your ability to safeguard your backups and ensure your company doesn’t become a headline.