World Backup Day Offers a Reminder to Protect your Data Every Day

Last week, someone in my office mentioned that 31st March is celebrated internationally as World Backup Day. Personally, I am not a huge fan of these so-called special days AKA “Valentine’s Day,” “Women’s Day,” “Father’s Day,” “Mother’s Day,” etc. You need to care, love, and treat each other with respect throughout the year rather than wait for a special day to appreciate/recognize someone.

Drawing parallels to World Backup Day is easy to do. Backup never takes a break. You need your data to be protected 24×7, 365 days a year. In fact, the necessity of a good backup does not depend on your occupation or technical skills. If you have important data, whether it is your business-critical applications, photos from your holiday, your personal music collections, all should be backed up.

Enterprise data is no different. In a world full of cyber threats, running a business is difficult enough – without taking unnecessary risks. Much like the diver’s cage, the IT infrastructure you choose can make a critical difference in data protection. How well protected is your data? And how quickly can you restore things to normal should something go wrong? You need to answer these questions now, before your defenses are breached.

If your IT organization is like most, you have been accumulating data protection solutions over the years. Now you find yourself saddled with rigid, siloed infrastructure based on an equally rigid backup strategy. If it feels like inadequate protection, that is because it is. You are constantly stuck in maintenance mode, with disparate, multi-vendor backup and recovery systems that are complex and expensive to maintain. Multiple touch points of administration slow down production, and the costs of software licensing, disruptive upgrades, and capacity over-provisioning add up fast.

So why World Backup Day?

It’s a commemorative date celebrated annually by the backup and tech industry all over the world. World Backup Day started with a Reddit post where a user wrote about losing their hard drive and wishing someone had reminded them about how important it is to backup data.

Today, if you search for IT horror stories on the internet, most of them will be about inadequate or missing backups and hence the importance of reviewing your backup environment regularly. The harsh reality of today is that all of us are at risk of losing our data and there might be a variety of reasons to it – human error, failed hardware, natural disasters, hackers, and virus attacks.

Fortify your data defense with HPE

Modern data protection solutions are much more than the 3-2-1-1 backup rule to mitigate data loss in the face of ransomware and other malicious attacks. To ensure your data is safeguarded and recoverable, HPE delivers flexible, economical solutions that are easy to integrate into your workflows and effortless to manage. Most importantly, ensuring that your data is not accessible to ransomware. Your data should be stored in a way that makes it invisible to unauthorized encryption, and your solution should let you restore data efficiently at any time.

Building on our long history of helping you protect your data; we have identified key data protection challenges that affect all organizations in one way or another. We have listened to our customers’ needs and responded with multiple solutions that offer the right fit for a variety of environments.

Protecting across hybrid cloud

Finding a balance between meeting near-zero RPOs and low RTOs and complying with regulatory requirements can be challenging. Data protection services with HPE GreenLake provide maximum flexibility and security on a hybrid cloud platform with simple management through a single SaaS (software as a service) console. Get secure and efficient backups from HPE GreenLake Backup and Recovery complemented by real-time replication and granular journaling with HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery.

• HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is SaaS-based disaster recovery (DR) that delivers a fast, effortless way to eliminate data loss and downtime for your hybrid cloud.
• HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery is SaaS-based backup that easily protects on-premises VMware VMs (virtual machines), Microsoft SQL, and cloud-native workloads such as Amazon EBS, EC2, EKS and RDS.

Ransomware resilience and disaster recovery

Zerto, with its unmatched continuous data protection (CDP) technology, delivers the lowest RPOs and RTOs in the industry. Zerto provides real-time encryption detection and real-time replication and is a market-leading solution for ransomware resilience, disaster recovery, and multi-cloud mobility. You can manage Zerto yourself, or have it partially or fully managed by one of our 350+ managed service providers (MSPs) for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). With the Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault, you have an ironclad cyber recovery option. It provides immutable data copies and zero trust architecture using Zerto, HPE Aruba Networking, HPE ProLiant, and HPE Alletra to deliver rapid air-gapped recovery after even the worst attack.

Rapid recovery on premises

Some organizations prefer to deploy data protection solutions in their on-premises environment. HPE StoreOnce provides rapid data recovery and low-cost long-term retention that spans the entire enterprise. Reduce the amount of backup data you need to store by up to 95% (considering 20:1 dedupe) and choose between powerful dedicated appliances for data centers and flexible virtual appliances for smaller deployments in remote and branch offices.

Create an air gap

An air gap ensures that any device that is not connected to a network cannot be attacked remotely. One of the challenges of data protection solutions is that they are exposed to the same ransomware threat as the rest of your datacenter. Any backup environment attached to your network can be infected with the same ransomware that corrupted your primary database, preventing you from accessing your backup data at a critical time. Traditional tape storage provides a vital last line of defense because you can maintain copies of data fully offline behind an air gap. Tape storage continues to be in strong demand as a scalable and secure method to protect and retain infrequently accessed, yet essential data in the long term. The ultra-low cost per GB and rapid transportability of HPE StoreEver tape provides extra reassurance that you can rapidly recover data if an incident occurs.

Let’s not wait until every March 31st to get back in control!

Of course, you don’t have to wait for World Backup Day to evaluate your data protection strategy (but it serves as a friendly remind as to how important this is!). Modernizing data protection puts you in control and can improve efficiencies, too, by reducing cost, risk, and complexity in backup environments. Protecting your data at the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud will set you up to deliver future SLAs, enabling you to meet demanding RPOs and RTOs and keep your business moving ahead.

Get started today: read our Data Protection Buyers Guide, and make sure you have, or will be prepared to choose, the right data protection solutions to support your strategy and needs.

Ashwin Shetty