As World Backup Day Turns 10, Here’s Why It’s Still As Important As Ever
World Backup Day has been around for a decade, and its pledge, “I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on March 31st,” remains as relevant and as important as ever. But what started as a personal reminder as people were adopting personal computers quickly became a much bigger reminder for today’s cloud-based, always-on organizations. Dig a little deeper into this vital message and it’s clear to see how this message and the backup challenges faced by data-driven businesses have dramatically evolved. Now, in 2021, the only real solution for a digital, 24/7 business’s data is continuous data protection. Yet, many companies are still, unfortunately, relying on legacy snapshot backups and worrying about weekly, monthly, or even annual backup timelines.
In recognition of its value over the last 10 years, I wanted to share my thoughts on how the message behind World Backup Day can help IT leaders and professionals build a resilient infrastructure that protects one of their companies’ most valuable assets – data!
Since 2011, World Backup Day has acted as a poignant reminder for people to prepare for the unexpected by backing up their important files. Data loss can happen in a variety of ways, and while losing family photographs or important receipts can personally be extremely irritating, for businesses the financial, reputational, and legal damage associated with data loss can be catastrophic. Though World Backup Day strikes a slightly humorous tone – falling the day before April Fool’s Day – the consequences of data loss are anything but amusing.
The 10-year anniversary of World Backup Day comes at a fundamental turning point for backup technology. . COVID has pushed businesses to move online faster than ever, creating zero tolerance for data loss or downtime as customers are expecting a true always-on experience. Traditional backup relies on periodic snapshots often on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, which places a massive burden on production environments and often forces IT teams to run these at night to avoid disruption. This leaves them struggling to meet or exceed the two primary metrics associated with backup: recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
Now, as businesses focus on providing an ‘always-on’ service to their customers and the constant increase of cyber threats, organizations are thinking about how they can protect their data continuously with every change, update, or new piece of data protected and to ensure it’s available in real time. Continuous data protection (CDP) is enabling this change, saving data in intervals of seconds – rather than days or months – and giving IT teams the granularity to quickly rewind operations to just seconds before a disruption occurred. Completely flexible, CDP enables an IT team to quickly recover anything from a single file or virtual machine to a full application and right up to an entire site. As more organizations join the CDP revolution, data loss may one day become as harmless as an April Fool’s joke. Until then, it remains a real and present danger – one that I’m passionate about resolving with Zerto’s platform.
For those businesses that are still relying on legacy snapshot backup technology, the risk of data loss is a costly, clear, and present danger. Yet, for varying reasons, ensuring the continuous backup of a company’s data often is deprioritized. At Zerto, we recently decided to try using levity to help communicate the gravity of insufficient backup strategies: we launched a meme contest. Have a laugh at some of the creations below, and feel free to share widely to help businesses make sure they, too, have the last laugh in the event of a business disruption.
If your business is considering modernizing your backup, I urge you to check out Zerto Versus Traditional Backup to see just where continuous data protection can fill in the gaps.
Gil Levonai 
