Backup Awareness Month is a great opportunity to reflect and learn from the past to prepare for the future. It’s crystal clear that in our digital age, in a world dominated by data, it has never been more crucial to protect this valuable commodity. Helping our customers on a daily basis, we’re sure that traditional backup strategies and recovery plans, although foundational, may no longer suffice in the face of sophisticated cyber threats and complex hybrid infrastructures.

Following a standard backup practice, such as the 3-2-1 rule – having at least three copies of your data, stored on two different media, with one copy offsite – is a vital starting point. But it’s just that, a starting point. I’d like to bring your attention to two important aspects needed to truly safeguard our data – we need to go beyond the basics and start looking into and for the data itself.

First, the complexity of modern data management calls for proactive data monitoring and the ability to spot threats such as ransomware in real-time. Simply put, it’s not enough to back up data; we need to ensure that we’re backing up healthy, uncompromised data. By catching and isolating threats before they can infect backup copies, we add another critical layer of defense.

Second, understanding our digital ecosystem and knowing where data gets created is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of data protection. With the proliferation of cloud platforms, mobile devices, remote workspaces, and IoT devices, data generation is no longer confined to traditional data centers. This expanding data landscape brings with it a complex web of storage locations and data types that businesses must navigate.

That’s why backup awareness and data protection solution must evolve towards a holistic approach to data protection. A variety of challenges makes it increasingly important. We’re going to need a comprehensive solution, intertwining backup, recovery, and security, to provide a robust shield against data loss.