World Backup Day 2021: take the pledge to keep your data safe

World Backup Day started ten years ago on a Reddit thread, and despite what one user said in that post, ten years later it serves as a significant yearly reminder for people to back up their important data. 

Why back up your data?

The importance of backup – and more importantly recovery – has increasingly grown  within the past ten years. Backup has transitioned from being that annoying thing you have to do (and you hope you never need), to something that serves many very important business purposes.

Cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) are enabling companies around the world to just say no to ransomware. A properly designed DR system enables you to bring your entire environment back online very quickly, which could allow you to ignore those ransom demands. 

Enabling safe and secure business

A centralized backup system also acts as another “canary in the coal mine” where ransomware is concerned. Machine learning applied at the right spot can easily detect a ransomware attack, albeit after the fact. Machine learning  also enables other interesting possibilities. Imagine, for example, if you could use machine learning to predict and prevent backup failures, Minority Report style. It’ll be interesting to see that evolve.

Backups have also evolved in recent years at handling other use cases. eDiscovery, for example, used to require a separate archive system to work properly. The kinds of searches you needed to do for e-discovery requests weren’t possible in traditional backup systems, but now an increasing number of backup offerings like Druva are enabling e-discovery searches against backup data. This saves money and actually makes for a more defensible eDiscovery process, as environments can evaluate all of your data in a single search. This ability to search backups is only going to lead to more possibilities as well. 

It’s also exciting to see backups being used to protect some of the world’s most important data. I’ve seen Druva be used to protect COVID-19 research data, and even space missions! 

Looking ahead

If we can make backup significantly easier (which I believe backup-as-a-service has done), and add to the value it brings to businesses (which we’ve also done), perhaps it can move more to the forefront. If backup just happens, and provides more than just an insurance policy, perhaps storage vendors would stop coming out with products designed to eliminate it! (Just last week I was in my latest argument with yet another storage vendor that says their product is so good it doesn’t need backup). 

Nothing is perfect. Everything might need a restore at some point. Everything might need disaster recovery – especially to recover from ransomware. Therefore,  everything needs backup. How backup happens will change over the years, but the core need to be able to bring everything back when the worst happens will never change. 

Happy World Backup Day. The best time to back up your data is now. Explore everything the Druva Cloud Platform has to offer.