Resilient data backup and recovery is critical to enterprise success

As businesses digitally transform and leverage technology such as artificial intelligence, the volume of data they rely on is increasing at an unprecedented pace.

Analysts IDC^[1] predict that the amount of global data will more than double between now and 2026. Meanwhile, Foundry’s Digital Business Research shows 38% of organizations surveyed are increasing spend on Big Data projects. 

While these developments present exciting opportunities, it’s vital businesses also ensure they have a robust resiliency strategy in place. 

According to the 2023 Veeam Data Protection Trends Report, 85% of respondents said they had been hit with ransomware attacks at least once in 2022. Even worse, one-third of companies that paid the ransom still didn’t get their data back, and the average downtime for ransomware victims was two weeks. This data doesn’t even take into account other threats to business continuity, ranging from natural disasters to the accidental deletion of data.

And in a troubling new trend, backup repositories have become the primary target for ransomware attacks, with backups targeted in 94% of attacks, and at least a portion of backup repositories impacted in 68% of cyber events, according to the 2022 Veeam Ransomware Report.

Irrespective of where data lives – public cloud, at the edge, or on-premises – secure backup and recovery is essential to any enterprise security strategy.

Best practices for backup and restore

Roy Adiel, Cloud Solutions Architect at Veeam, advises, “For IT leaders and CEOs, what they need to do in order to ensure business continuity and protect themselves is to make sure they have established a well-defined backup procedure that gives them not only the ability to back up their data, but also to assure how and where they restore that data.” 

 So, what must IT leaders consider? The first step is to establish data protection policies that include encryption and least privilege access permissions. Businesses should then ensure they have three copies of their data – the production copy already exists and is effectively the first copy.  The second copy should be stored on a different media type, not necessarily in a different physical location (the logic behind it is to not store your production and backup data in the same storage device). The third copy could or should be an offsite copy that is also offline, air-gapped, or immutable (Amazon S3 with Object Lock is one example). 

Organizations also need to make sure they have a centralized view of data protection across all environments for greater management, monitoring and governance, and they need orchestration tools to help automate data recovery.

Finally, organizations should conduct frequent backup and recovery testing to make sure that everything works as it should. 

How Hudson Bay Company met its data backup challenge

Iconic retailer Hudson Bay Company (HBC) was transitioning from on-premises data centers to a multi-cloud architecture as part of its digital transformation efforts, when it discovered that its legacy backup systems showed signs of failing. 

Matthew Pick, Senior Director of Cloud Architecture at HBC, said: “We needed one flexible, powerful and scalable solution to protect every workload everywhere.”

HBC selected Veeam to provide a single platform that simplifies and centralizes data protection across the multicloud environment. Veeam helps HBC ensure business continuity, meet internal compliance requirements and protect against ransomware. In addition, the Veeam solution saves HBC $1 million in one-time CAPEX and $600,000 in recurring OPEX annually.

Find out more on the Veeam website. 

^[1] IDC, Worldwide IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2022–2026: Enterprise Organizations Driving Most of the Data Growth, May 2022