World Backup Day 2023: A numbers game  

Article written by Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam

At some point in one’s personal life or professional life, they have likely lost data or have fallen victim to data theft.

World Backup Day 2023 is a great opportunity to take a more pragmatic approach to the best practices an organization should adopt to minimize and protect valuable data – and turn this into growing statistics. We challenge businesses to look at it as a numbers game. Keeping the refreshed 2023 outlook in mind, here are a few important numbers to take in and motivate everyone to do the best with their backups.

The 3-2-1 Rule

This isn’t new or broken, but needs a refresh given the current state of cyberthreats and ransomware attacks. The 3-2-1 Rule is a great data management principle that states there should be 3 (or more) copies of data on 2 (or more) different media, with at least 1 of those being off-site. This is great as it doesn’t prescribe any particular hardware technology and it prepares you for nearly every failure scenario, if you combine this rule with the best practices below.

99.999999999% Durability

Object storage has been designed for at least 99.999999999% annual durability, and that should be very appealing to many in the market today. Cloud and object storage is not new, but it has clearly proven scale, durability, and availability in the market. It’s now time that object storage takes a serious stake in the 3-2-1 Rule as well.

85% of businesses have experienced ransomware

The Veeam Ransomware Trends Report 2022 indicated that the majority (85%) of businesses experienced at least 1 ransomware incident in the last year. It’s not if or when anymore, but how many times.

How do we put all of this together for World Backup Day 2023? Businesses should build on the capabilities available in the market while recognizing the realities of the threats today. Ransomware is a disaster that, by the numbers, is much more likely to hit than a fire, or a flood. Let’s take one of the more resilient storage types, object storage, and leverage one of the more unique aspects of its value: immutability.

On this World Backup Day 2023, double down on the 3-2-1 Rule with the two non-production copies of backup data on immutable targets, quite possibly with both of them being object storage. Imagine a 3-2-1 rule implementation where both separate copies were immutable object storage. How resilient is that?

You may wonder, how do we address the logical requirement of 1 copy off-site? We could go to the cloud from on-premises (inherently off-site); we could use different cloud regions (definitely off-site) from the two copies; we could use different availability zones and cloud subscriptions (logically off-site and abstracted). The cloud and object storage world bring so much more to the equation for designing a more resilient 3-2-1 Rule – there is now no reason we can’t have a highly resilient backup infrastructure that provides a high likelihood of being able to recover data in a ransomware incident.

 

The views in the article are those of the author and may not reflect the views of this publication. 

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