The sobering result of the brand-new Veeam Data Protection Report 2021: More than 3000 IT decision-makers in global companies, including more than 300 from Germany, do not give themselves good marks when it comes to data protection and data management in their own companies.
Only very few have well thought-out backup strategies, 14% of all data is not backed up at all, and almost 60% of all recovery attempts fail. Unprotected, even lost data is diametrically opposed to digitization requirements. The business continuity and reputation of a company are thus massively vulnerable.
How can this still be in 2021, when cyber attacks are developing exponentially? The BSI's warnings to all Microsoft 365 users to quickly close gaps and, above all, to check what malware may already have been implemented on company servers are good examples of this.
Every year, World Backup Day on March 31 tries to raise awareness among individuals and businesses alike about the importance of having well thought-out backup strategies.
With a large range of cloud solutions, this is supposedly easy to implement nowadays. However, the devastating fire at the 5-story server center of Europe's largest French cloud provider OVH shows how dangerous a cloud-only strategy is and how it should be implemented as a cloud-first strategy. 12,000 servers burned with all the data stored there. 3.6 million websites went offline – including government portals and banks. Several major customers lost vast amounts of data irrevocably in the fire because they had no additional protection in the form of data cases with removable hard disks.
For many years, there has been the simple 3-2-1 rule that reliably prevents this: 3 copies – 2 media – 1 external backup at another location.
91 percent have increased their use of cloud services in the first few months of the pandemic, and the majority will continue to do so, with 60 percent planning to add more cloud services to their IT strategy. By 2023, 77 percent of organizations worldwide will be using cloud-first backups, according to the report. But in the event of a disaster, how long will it take to recover lost data? What happens in the event of a server crash? What happens in the event of a total failure?
There should always be additional safeguards to avoid increasingly endangering digital business models in the long term. Efficiency and cost savings should not be the decisive factors, but data protection and preservation of business continuity. The ideal complement to cloud models are external hard disks that are transported and stored in so-called data cases. The cases offer optimum protection, e.g. against moisture or shocks. If these data cases are also stored in high-security archives and the backup hard disks are regularly replaced and updated, there is always a secure fallback solution in the event of virus attacks, hacker attacks, technical defects or environmental disasters such as the fire at the beginning of March. We will be happy to advise you on this in detail!