Backup is not the most glamorous of IT functions. It doesn’t impress your customers, or your employees, for that matter. It’s not easy to connect the dots between backup and the bottom line. But backup is one of the most important IT functions that few people think about.

Backup is one of the most important operations in the IT environment. If data is lost or corrupted due to disaster, security breach, equipment failure or simple human error, backup is the lifeline that keeps your business running.

Traditionally, backup has been very difficult to get right.

In August 2023, Toyota Motor Corp. was forced to shut down more than a dozen manufacturing facilities in Japan due to a backup failure. The company said an error during server maintenance left insufficient disk space for its production order system. Backup servers replicated the error and could not be accessed.

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.

A new study reveals that critical shortcomings in standard data protection strategies are putting organizations at increased risk of downtime and data loss. IDC researchers report that an alarming 93 percent of organizations across North America and Western Europe suffered a data-related business disruption during the past 12 months with nearly 60 percent experiencing unrecoverable data loss.

Businesses across the globe are expanding their use of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to support hybrid work models, modernize IT environments and improve agility. In the process, many are also inadvertently putting business-critical data at risk.

Email remains the most common business communication and collaboration tool, far outpacing phone, text and video usage. The average office worker now sends and receives approximately 140 business emails each day, and analysts say usage continues to grow by about 7 percent annually.

As part of their digital transformation efforts, organizations of all shapes and sizes are embracing technologies that allow them to analyze massive data sets in order to gain market insights, optimize operations and create personalized customer experiences.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of an effective backup and disaster (BDR) recovery solution. If you can’t recover data following a natural disaster, system failure or cyberattack, your business may not survive. Even a short interruption in service can be financially crippling — new research from Datto finds that the average cost of downtime has increased nearly 600 percent over the past three years.

The continued digitization of business processes and workflows has caused data volumes to skyrocket. According to research firm IDC, global data volumes could reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. In case you’re wondering, a zettabyte is a billionterabytes.

Where are we going to put it all?

That’s the question small to midsize businesses (SMBs) should be asking themselves.