World Backup Day: the day to prevent data loss!

Why Data Backup is Important for Your Business It is World Backup Day on 31st March. A day for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the importance of regular backups. It is an initiative to raise awareness about the importance of backups and data preservation. Like most, this initiative started out on the internet raised by a couple of concerned users on reddit.

Data loss can have serious implications for any business. Despite this, a surprising number of businesses don't even have a disaster recovery plan in place. Statistics highlighted by Comparitech leads you to believe the safety of data is still not being prioritised enough by businesses.

The article highlights a report written by the Ponemon Institute and 2020, Cyber security in the Remote Work Era. Only 45% of businesses believed they were financially prepared for a cyber attack as a result of moving to remote working.

Furthermore, just 39% believe that their staff has the expertise needed to properly defend against attackers.

The Global Data Risk Report by Varonis, on average, 33% of all folders used by a company are open to everyone. To put this in perspective, 64% of employees have access to 1,000 or more folders containing sensitive information. In other words, there is a high probability that something could be accidentally created, updated, or deleted without you even knowing!

Ransomware attacks cause an average of 16.2 days of downtime. Ransomware makes files on the target system unreadable without a decryption key (held by the attacker).

Typically, ransomware works by encrypting select files, then forcing the victim to pay up in order to decrypt them. The 2021 Coveware study reported the average downtime for businesses following a ransomware attack was 22 days. This latest figure was for Q3 2021.

So, what are the best practices for backup and disaster recovery? There are many types of disasters on different scales that could result in the loss of data.

Someone accidentally wiping terabytes of file-based assets from production servers

A fire in the building that destroys all of your LTO files (more frequent than you think!)

An environmental or global event making a broadcast facility unavailable

How to keep your data safe? Is your data disconnected from the rest of the organisation in siloed networks or on tapes on shelves? With cyber-crime on the increase, your data is vulnerable. Avoid having access to large amounts of data from single PCs or logins as this can create a major security hole. This will keep your data safe and secure.

The following are some best practices for how to keep your data (and backups) safe:

To avoid a major security risk, don't have access to large amounts of data from a single PC / login.

Think about your backup, disaster recovery, and replication strategies with the hackers in mind. At some point, a determined hacker will compromise a PC. What could a determined hacker do from there?

Historically organisations relied on LTO technology for backup but when you need to be online quickly following an outage LTO is no longer the appropriate platform

Consider keeping your data safe in purpose-built storage that adheres to good Digital Content Governance principles. Exposing everything via a filesystem is extremely dangerous.

Consider on-premises object storage for this. Plan how your company will secure digital content. Get into the mind of the hacker and be prepared for a cyber attack.

Be Prepared Consider implementing business continuity and recovery strategies to help assess internal and external risk and how you intend on mitigating this.

A business continuity plan identifies what risks have to be tolerated, which ones can be transferred and which ones require mitigation. Typically, this would rest on the tenants of resilience, recovery and contingency.

The business continuity plan provides a risk mitigation strategy for the organisation, whilst the disaster recovery plan details the mitigation strategy. Today, most businesses are data centric, especially in the broadcast and media industry.

In this day and age, media organisations keep their assets digitally and more often than not in a centralised system. There is the advantage for management and delivery of data, but this can also create the risk for a potential disaster. Losing assets to a disaster, virus, human error, or malicious action is a huge risk that should not be ignored.

In the event of an outage getting instant access to the backup is essential so you need to keep in mind ensuring applications and user credentials are also available in the DR or BC locations.

Our View Having a business continuity or disaster recovery strategy is an essential extension of data management in the post-LTO era. Tools are there to help to make this simple and easy to manage (of course we would strongly advocate MatrixStore). If done correctly, having distributed data can also help workflow, e.g., by being able to work on assets in multiple locations.

Looking after our customers since 2003 Having a partner that understands media workflows and cyber security demands is where Object Matrix fits in. We've had immutable data vault options since the inception of our object storage product MatrixStore.

MatrixStore is the leading media focused object storage platform. It benefits organisations both financially and operationally, by modernising video workflows and providing instant access to all media assets.

The platform is built on mature, feature-rich, and future-proof object-based storage technology. It provides operational efficiencies, full digital content governance, multiple media based workflows, and secure access to all archive content, from anywhere.

MatrixStore is a highly firewalled private cloud storage solution that also provides a range of additional defences against ransomware att

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