World Backup Day Highlights the Importance of Cloud, Cyber Solutions

World Backup Day is today. Each year the day should remind us to take important steps to back up our critical data given that data breaches rose 9.8% between 2020 to 2021.

One way of guarding this data is by adopting a cloud-first approach to protection, according to the experts at N-able. When it comes to MSPs, the company said many data protection products send backups to remote cloud storage as a secondary or optional step. However, cloud-first backup delivers a more efficient architecture that is better suited for today’s professional IT requirements. In a recent survey by N-able for World Backup Day, the company found nearly half, or 45%, agreed with the idea that backup appliances (including tiering to the cloud) are an expensive approach to data protection, and no longer desirable. Reliance on local physical storage media means a heavy lift for managing and maintaining. Cloud-first data protection, eliminates the need for storage management, upgrades and patches, and provides other infrastructure-related tasks.

N-able’s Eric Harless

Eric Harless is N-able’s backup head nerd.

“Every business has its own needs but given the prevalence of ransomware that can attack backup files on the local network, cloud storage should be the default for data protection, and local storage a secondary option,” Harless said. “Ransomware threats show just how important it is to store backups off the local network, which is why an appliance-free, direct-to-cloud approach is the best approach.”

That said, a recent study found that 32% of companies using cloud had experienced data loss in the cloud across numerous threats. It points out that 64% of this data loss was accidental and that 20% was down to malicious intent.

Cybersecurity

Unitrends’ Joe Noonan

Joe Noonan is product executive, backup and disaster recovery for Unitrends and Spanning.

“The shift to remote working completely transformed the way organizations protect and store their data,” Noonan said. “Today, there is a greater focus on protecting data no matter where it lives — on-prem, on the laptops of remote employees, in clouds and in SaaS applications. Recovery time objectives (RTOs) are increasingly shrinking in today’s always-on world, with goals being set in hours — if not minutes.”

Cybercriminals take advantage of remote and hybrid work environments to conduct increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. As a result, more organizations are turning to vendors that provide unified business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). This includes backup and disaster recovery, AI-based automation and ransomware safeguards as well as disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). Unified BCDR has become a necessity due to the growing amount of data organizations must protect and the increasing number of cyberattacks taking place against businesses of all sizes.

According to the Acronis Cyber Protection Week Global report for World Backup Day 2022, only half of organizations allocate less than 10% of their overall IT budget to IT security. The report surveyed over 6,200 IT users and IT managers from small businesses to enterprises across 22 countries. Some major findings include:

• While 78% of organizations globally run as many as 10 different solutions for data protection and cybersecurity, 76% of organizations experienced downtime due to data loss — a 25% increase from 2021.
• Only 10% of users back up daily, 15% of users back up once or twice a week — while 34% of users back up monthly. Forty-one percent of users rarely or never back up their data.
• Over half of all personal IT users (56%) lost data at least once in 2021 — 26% lost it multiple times.

SMBs

The average cost of data loss without a backup solution in place equates to almost $4,000. This does not count the potential reputational damage and fines from regulators. Cloud has enabled businesses to evolve and thrive, especially through the current pandemic. It’s clear that data stored in the cloud still needs to be backed up via a dedicated method. This is according to Carl Oliver, product manager at Giacom.

Giacom’s Carl Oliver

“Clearly, Covid-19 has created the perfect situation for cybercriminals to exploit,” Oliver said. “With many IT teams stretched – either by work at home restrictions, cloud/digital transformation projects or cyberattacks – they have their work cut out for them. The pressure they face is unprecedented and emphasizes the importance of putting in place robust data recovery and business continuity strategies to support their businesses. Evidently, there is a significant opportunity for the channel to step in and provide advisory and execution support and services to SMB customers.”

Oliver said the pandemic has advanced digitalization across the globe by around five to eight years. Moreover, transitioning toward the use of cloud-based technologies has formed a key component of this transformation. However, as organizations shift from using on-premise solutions to the cloud, many will not have considered that data – despite being located in the cloud – still needs to be backed up. This is particularly true of the SMB market.

“The channel needs to educate and support SMB organizations as they develop and deploy their cloud strategies. But, it also means that ITCs need to work with their CSP partners to capitalize on the potential recurring revenue generating opportunities that backup provisioning can offer,” he said.