World Backup Day: Here’s what some industry experts say

Spread the love

The software and tech industry observes World Backup Day on March 31 every year. The day marks the high significance of data backup in businesses and organisations globally.

In today’s digital age, data has become the new centrifugal force that propels large-sized enterprises to mid-sized businesses to tech startups across industries and segments.

While the significance of data continues to grow enormously for companies and businesses globally, it is equally important for them to invest in data backup technology and software solutions. This is will not only securely store and manage their business and customer data but will enable them to drive their corporate and organisational strategies including digital transformation initiatives.

Data backup as a technology concept and its practical functionalities are beyond the limits and scope of businesses and organisations. Today data backup is equally important and essential for individuals and people as well.

To mark World Backup Day this year, some of the major players in the data backup technology and software solutions space in India have shared their comments and insights to signify this day.

World Backup Day is a day, set aside to remind everyone who uses and touch data to back up their data, according to Pradeep Seshadri, Director of Systems Engineering – Commvault (India & SAARC). And, with the COVID-19 pandemic and hybrid work culture, it is even more important to protect data effectively and regularly.

“Out of the data boom and need for intelligent data management, one of the fastest emerging trends on data backup is the concept of Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) that is taking the data world by storm. BaaS brings many benefits that outstrip its traditional, outdated counterparts,” said Seshadri.

About the key advantage, Seshadri pointed that the scalability of BaaS solutions means a significantly reduced cost of ownership and operation compared to the expensive investments and commitment required for physical backup infrastructure.

Other benefits of BaaS includes unrestricted capacity and recovery time. “BaaS scalability also means that limited physical capacity of traditional backups doesn’t hamper the companies. Recovery time is significantly important to maintain business operations. It is also shortened, especially with Disaster Recovery, which is optimized for as little downtime as possible,” he added.

Most organisations today are more prudent in terms of capital investments and expenses along with their operational expenses. And that’s where BaaS or backup solutions scores higher and addresses their IT budget constraints.

“BaaS backup solutions also fall under Operating Expenses (OpEx), while more traditional backup solutions tend to incur Capital Expenses (CapEx). As the CapEx investment can be prohibitively high, this makes BaaS costs more palatable for companies that have had their IT budgets lowered over the years,” explained Seshadri.

Further, “BaaS offers benefits of being a managed service, it can be offloaded to a focused and expert solutions provider. With maintenance and management outsourced to a provider, BaaS frees up the skilled resource and assign them to more mission-critical or strategic tasks,” he added.

Today, there’s a wide variety of data backup and recovery solutions available in the market. These offerings are designed to meet the customer’s standard requirements as well as can be customized.

“BaaS can be tailored to the unique needs of each organisation. With backup extending even to applications such as Office 365 or Salesforce. No doubt why BaaS is fast becoming part of India Inc’s backup strategy” concluded Seshadri.

Despite the availability, Indian businesses and organisations haven’t able to leverage them to address IT infrastructure-related challenges. The Veeam Data Protection Report 2021 revealed that the majority (77%) of Indian organisations have an availability gap. This is because of the increasing pressure modernisation of having ageing legacy systems.

“This is both shocking and alarming,” said Veeam’s Senior Global Technologist – Product Strategy, Anthony Spiteri citing that report. “It is imperative that businesses have seamless data protection for both their corporate and customer data,” he emphasized.

According to Spiteri, businesses need to have a plan when the inevitable happens. Data has grown into a key element for every digital business, so the solutions must grow with it.

“Legacy tools are an outdated answer to yesterday’s challenges. And having the right tech allows digital transformation by ensuring the availability and integrity of your critical data,” concluded Spiteri.

58% of data backups failing, creating data protection issues and limiting digital transformation (DX) initiatives revealed the Veeam report. The report is indicative that organisations need to have data backup planning. It should be part of overall IT and digital strategies that enables their digital transformation (DX) efforts and initiatives.

World Backup Day will help to inform, aware and educated other domains and industry segments on why data backup is crucial today.

Happy World Backup Day 2021.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *