In an increasingly data-driven world, legacy backup systems and strategies no longer provide adequate data protection. Tools designed for conventional on-premises backup are poorly suited for protecting data spread across multiple data centers, cloud platforms, edge servers and endpoint devices. As a result, many organizations are experiencing high failure rates that leave critical data unprotected and vulnerable to cyberattacks specifically targeting backup repositories.
Recent research illustrates the weakness. According to the latest annual data protection survey by a backup industry leader, more than half of all backup jobs fail and nearly a fifth of all data globally is not backed up at all. Further, the company reports that 93 percent of ransomware attacks now target backups to limit victims’ ability to recover from those events.
The research shows that legacy approaches to backup do not support the needs of modern IT workloads. Business leaders need to modernize their backup and recovery operations to avoid business disruption in the event of a ransomware attack.
This good news is that more organizations are recognizing this need. According to the survey, 85 percent of organizations are increasing their data protection budgets this year, and 57 percent expect to change their primary backup system. Here are some of the recommended modernization strategies:
Increased Automation
Automated testing features ensure that all data and applications can be recovered if there is a disruption. Backup automation also ensures that data is regularly and consistently backed up, reducing the risk of data loss and downtime. Most important, it eliminates error-prone manual processes and relieves IT staff of a great deal of management burden. Backups occur automatically on a scheduled basis, and data is automatically compressed, deduplicated and encrypted.
Cloud Backup
Cloud backup should be an essential element of any modernization strategy. Besides providing virtually limitless storage capacity, cloud-based backup makes it easier to restore data in the event of a ransomware attack, server crash or some other disruptive event. In many cases, the ideal approach would be to combine cloud-based backups with on-premises solutions in a hybrid environment. In this way, you can create local backups for quick restores and offsite backups for disaster recovery. It also ensures data redundancy and reduces the risk of data loss.
Immutable Backups
Backup modernization should include an option for creating immutable backups that cannot be encrypted, deleted or otherwise modified in any way, even by an administrator. This ensures you have a clean version of data that is always recoverable and safe from any attack or system failure. Immutable backups should be part of a “3-2-1” data protection strategy that requires three separate copies of data with two stored on different types of media and the immutable backup stored in the cloud or at another offsite location.
Incremental Backups
Full system backups are notoriously resource-intensive and time-consuming. Many backup failures result from overrunning the allocated backup window. Incremental backups speed things up by only capturing changes made since the last backup. This minimizes the impact on network and storage resources and reduces the risk of backup failures.
Virtualization-Specific Backups
Traditional backup techniques don’t work well where multiple virtual machines (VMs) run on a single server. Backing up VMs requires synchronization of the storage layer, hypervisor, operating system and application because data is often active in each. Virtualization-specific backup solutions integrate with multiple hypervisors to provide efficient backups at the VM level.
Given the extreme threat of ransomware, backup modernization efforts must also incorporate strong security controls. We’ll take a closer look at some of the key ways to secure the backup environment in our next post.
