With a ransomware event projected every 11 seconds in 2022 and the rise in the value of data, the need for secure, reliable backup will become even more critical for an organisation to leverage for mission critical restorations. As a result of this trend, Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) growth is predicted to more than double in the next three years.

Now more than ever, having an air-gapped/hardened backup target has become a must-have. Many ransomware varieties or malicious processes will attempt to delete or encrypt backup data. Ensuring your organisation's backups are protected from those threats is an absolute necessity.

So as ransomware and other cyber threats continue to grow, organisations embrace the hybrid working environment, and incidents of large-scale unplanned outages continue to be regular headlines, we must all pay attention to the lessons of World Backup Day.

Regardless of the size of your organisation, it’s likely that data is an essential aspect of running it. If you don’t yet have a solid plan to keep your data safe, there are five things you should consider:

• All humans make errors
• Computer systems crash when you’re least prepared
• Compliance requirements are becoming more complex
• Attacks and ransomware events are on the rise
• Data is growing exponentially

It is not a question of if, but when a data loss incident will occur. Data loss occurs when data is accidentally deleted or something causes data to become corrupted. Viruses, physical damage or formatting errors can render data unreadable by both humans and software. In other instances, lost files and information cannot be recovered, making backup even more essential.

Backup for the Growing Business

If your organisation generates any business data - and it will – then it is crucial to treat every day like World Backup Day. Two years into the pandemic, business data continues to grow at an insane pace. As data grows and more data is needed to be stored and secure, this is having a dramatic effect on what organisations are demanding from their backup solutions.

This is precisely the challenge that major Train Operating Company, Greater Anglia, found itself up against last Spring. Greater Anglia wanted a backup solution that would protect its recent, large-scale investments into improving the customer experience that included a completely new, state-of-the-art fleet, station upgrades, and ticketing initiatives. These projects had secured the company a Gold Accreditation through the IdeasUK Innovation Assessment and a second consecutive “Train Operator of the Year Award” from the Rail Business Awards, but also generated a large increase in the amount of business data that needed safe, air-gapped storage.

The desire to bolster and protect the company’s major investments, which also included a digital transformation effort that saw the company’s wide area network upgraded, prompted Greater Anglia to begin its cloud journey. The cloud transformation began with a mandate to secure its investments in Microsoft 365, including OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint — an upgrade that coincided with the new network. Himesh and his team knew full well that Microsoft offered little in terms of backup protection and, to make matters worse, malicious attacks, like malware, ransomware and phishing, were on the rise.  

The team selected iland Secure Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365 and iland Secure Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect to address those concerns. This allowed Greater Anglia to protect its critical data from internal and external cybersecurity threats and reduce the total cost of data protection and retention, while also moving its overall backup strategy toward the cloud and away from outdated technologies like physical tape. 

Before partnering with iland, Greater Anglia had been backing up its mission-critical applications on premises via backup-to-tape, a technology that would not provide the flexibility and scalability the company needed as its business grew. Between the time, energy and resources spent on non-innovative maintenance, like replacing and storing old tapes, Himesh and his lean, 10-person IT team also had less time to further business objectives. 

With the move to cloud backup, however, valuable IT resources could be freed up to help the business complete more profitable business objectives, like rolling out the new trains, IT infrastructure and associated applications, wide area network, and new customer information screens at each station. 

Will you take the pledge?

As World Backup Day approaches, let’s take the pledge to backup not just our personal devices, but also our business investments. Use this year’s Backup Day as a deadline to create, or update, a backup and recovery plan of action for your organisation. The increase in disastrous events, whether from nature, human error, cyber attacks or ransomware, makes it that much more critical for organisations to consider all that they have to lose.