Partner Article

World Backup Day 2016

World Backup Day is celebrated every March 31st and reminds businesses of all shapes and sizes not to become April Fools when it comes to storing data.

A selection of technology thought leaders have had their say on the need for backing up in 2016 and how data can be secured.

Seth Knox, VP of product marketing at Atlantis Computing:

“An effective and flexible backup plan incorporates multiple software-based strategies and approaches. With software-defined and hyperconverged storage infrastructure, snapshots, replication and stretched clusters are being used to protect data both in a local data center cluster, across data centers or across the cloud. Regardless of the workload, from application servers in remote branch offices to thousands of virtual desktops distributed across an enterprise, IT teams are relying on software-based policies as the backbone of their disaster recovery implementations. This removes the human element by dictating that all virtual machines are accurately, automatically and consistently replicated to the DR sites, providing peace of mind that business can carry on despite any outage.”

Ellen Rome, Vice President of Marketing, X-IO:

“On the consumer level, backing up data has never been easier, especially with so many mobile devices connected to the cloud. If only it was that easy for businesses and the enterprise. IT leaders are struggling to keep up with growing demands for data backups and recovery that requires the right balance of performance, availability, simplicity and affordability. World Backup Day is a great reminder for IT leaders to explore the industry’s advancements in storage systems that won’t charge extra for high availability software features such as mirroring, snapshots, replication and stretch clustering.”

Wieland Alge, VP & GM EMEA at Barracuda Networks:

“Just like consumers, organisations are increasingly adopting SaaS applications such as Office 365 and Salesforce. But while the popularity of these applications grows, there is one issue that is not widely publicised – SaaS data protection. Most SaaS vendors backup their customers’ data to protect against application downtime, but they cannot protect customers from themselves; if data within the application is changed, either accidentally or on purpose, the overwritten data can be lost forever. Companies need same level of data protection for their SaaS deployments as they have for their existing on-premise applications. If there’s one thing you should do this World Backup Day, go check that your organisation’s SaaS application data is protected from both technology and human errors.”

Mario Blandini, chief evangelist and VP of product marketing at SwiftStack:

“It is the beginning of the end for backup as we know it. Far too many individuals do inadequate backups, and technology has evolved to automatically protect and version the data we work with. Humans are bad at backup, apps are great at it.”

“Both consumer and business adoption of cloud storage solutions like DropBox has marked the beginning of the end for backup as users know it. Application developers now build the apps we use to roll-back and recover documents ‘forever’.”

“Make the most of this year’s World Backup Day. The simple term ‘backup’ is becoming obsolete for the way we use and collaborate with documents and media.”

“Increasingly, we will use our data and the protection just happens in the same way as we used to have to change car gears ourselves. Now with pervasive automatic transmissions we just drive. “

Kieran Harty, CTO & Co-Founder at Tintri:

“The applications on which businesses depend are increasingly being converted from physical to virtual—and you need to similarly shift your replication and recovery approach to keep pace. For example, conventional storage hoards virtualised applications into bulky vessels called LUNs (logical unit numbers). You’re typically forced to replicate an entire LUN (including everything it holds), but if you could replicate just the one application you care about it, you can be 95% more efficient. And if you need to recover or update a specific application, taking that action on the entire LUN can take hours or days, whereas targeted action on that one application could take seconds. That’s why choosing the right storage platform plays a huge role in how you manage application level replication and recovery.”

Peter Godden, VP, EMEA at Zerto:

“Every day we’re reminded that the growing complexity of data centre technologies and troves of data poses a significant challenge to not just C-level technologists, but business leaders as well. World Backup Day is a light hearted way for organisations of all industry types and sizes to take stock of the importance of protecting and recovering their critical IT infrastructure as they see the stark realities associated with this critical task. More than a celebration of backup, the day marks the overarching significance of making critical data and applications available to a point within seconds of loss either due to man-made, natural, or criminal disaster. This approach to creating the highest levels of confidence of ‘readiness’ among IT and business leaders is really the heart of what helps bring World Backup Day to life, particularly for highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.”

Gabriel Gambill, Senior Director of Product and Technical Operations at Quorum:

“Backup is essential for both businesses and individuals. As we move into a digital age consumers risk losing their personal files and documents while businesses risk failing compliance, losing highly sensitive data and hours of downtime. Data loss is a huge threat to many of today’s organizations and businesses need to be prepared. High availability and snapshot replication can ensure that the business has constant real time recovery, not only is data backed up and easily restored but so are critical applications. Businesses need Business Continuity (BC) and quick instant access to data that will allow the organization to return to business as usual. World Backup Day draws attention to this and the need for recovery. Once a disaster strikes it is too late, organizations need to be prepared.”

Geraldine Osman, VP International Marketing, Nexsan:

“On World Backup Day it’s important to draw attention to the wasted money spent on storing infrequently accessed data on primary storage, which slows down backups and raises costs. We estimate that 80% of data on primary storage can be easily identified as data that never changes, or changes infrequently. By offloading this data onto more appropriate storage, companies can ensure it’s backed up, whilst simultaneously speeding up the backups of their now lighter primary storage system. By choosing the right storage for the task you can have a backup strategy that saves your organisation time and money, even in this day of ever growing data.”

Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director, EMEA, Commvault:

“Your data, your responsibility’ is a clause embedded in the majority, if not all, Public Cloud contracts. The big Public Cloud providers typically use snapshots and replication to reduce the risk of data loss, but neither of these offer the protection of an actual backup copy. Clearly this isn’t so much of a problem for backup data sent to the cloud, but for critical data that only resides in the cloud, World Backup Day is a great reminder to check exactly what protection is in place and take action if needed to avoid undue risk.”

Tony Martin, Managing Director UK & Ireland, FalconStor:

“This Backup Day, organisations of all shapes and sizes need to realise that business-critical data is being generated on a daily basis and if this becomes inaccessible, they no longer have a business. This is why backing up is a fundamental process and should be carried out in every organisation, from small businesses to large enterprises.

“However, businesses should also have a disaster recovery plan and software that can implement this, in place. Snapshot technology is just one way of mitigating the risk of suffering down time if a disaster is declared. A big part of the down time is often experienced whilst retrieving back ups. What businesses fail to understand is that if a backup takes two days to complete, it will take two days to get the data back. This is where using snapshot proves to be the difference. This type of disaster recovery replicates the whole computing environment and captures everything from data and systems, to networks and applications. If a disaster is declared, using this snapshot technology will make a replicated version of the entire IT environment available.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Technology Thought Leaders .