Backup for World Backup Day…but make sure you can restore too
It's World Backup Day on March 31st. We're not going to lecture you on the importance of backing up your data because we know you're already pretty good at that – only 4% of respondents in our most recent Data Health Check didn't have a backup policy in place. But more important than backup alone, is your ability to actually recover following a data loss.
Our annual Data Health Check surveys over 400 IT decision makers from UK organisations about their views and experiences of cloud computing over the past 12 months. Over half of respondents (51%) experienced some sort of data loss in 2014.
Hardware and software failures were still the leading causes of data loss in 2014, with human error worryingly close behind them. You employees are still one of the weakest links in your data security chain.
External security breaches (which include malicious hacks, malware, spyware, etc.) only accounted for 6% of reported data loss among our respondents, but a shocking 36% of them had been affect by cyber-attacks in some form over the last 12 months.
Large organisations (500+ employees) were the biggest target for external attacks, with 10% losing data as a direct result of an external breach compared with just 1% of small organisations (less than 50 employees).
Most of the differences we identified between large and small businesses were to be expected – most are simply a result of scale: if you have more employees, you're more likely to experience human error. The biggest disparity, however, was when it came to retention policies. Nearly a quarter (23%) of small organisations failed to have any kind of retention policy in place for their backed-up data compared to just 3% of large organisations. If you don't retain your data for a specified period of time, you can't ensure you'll be able to restore it if your live copy is compromised. Taking backups is useless if you can't restore them at your point of need.
Another big influence on how quickly you can restore is the actual type of backup you're using. Our results showed a direct correlation between the speed of restore and the use of tape, a combination of tape and disk, and a fully online backup service.
Of the organisations that are only using tape for their backups, it would take 44% of them more than 24 hours to recover from a disaster. This fell to just 15% for those using a combination of tape and disk, and 11% for those using an online backup service - with nearly a third of online backup users able to recover in less than 4 hours.
So as important as backup is, understanding your ability to restore is equally so. If you have business-critical data that you'd need to restore within a short period of time, you want to evaluate your current backup methods and see if they allow for that.
You can take the World Backup Day pledge here.
For more information on our survey results, read the online Data Health Check infographic here, or download the full report here.