June Is Backup Awareness Month: Are Your Backups Secure?

According to IT Governance, as of May of this year, 9,478 publicly disclosed data breaches and cyberattacks resulted in over 35 billion known records being breached. Let that sink in. Arcserve partner Sophos The State of Ransomware 2024 reports that 59 percent of organizations were hit by ransomware last year. Your data is at risk.

Regardless of your organization's size, backups are the only way to ensure your data is safeguarded if it is locked up by ransomware, lost due to a breach, or deleted accidentally.

That brings us to our celebration of June as Backup Awareness Month.

Make Backup Best Practices Your Priority This Month (and Forever)

Best practices for backing up your data start with a 3-2-1-1 strategy, which works this way:

• Keep three copies of your data—one primary and two backups
• Store two copies locally on two formats (network-attached storage, tape, or local drive) 
• Store one copy offsite in the cloud or secure storage
• Keep one copy of your backups in immutable storage, where your backup data is converted to a write-once-read-many (WORM) format that can't be altered or deleted. 

Immutability is crucial to a sound data backup and disaster recovery plan. Why? Arcserve partner Sophos reports that 94 percent of organizations hit by ransomware last year said that the cybercriminals attempted to compromise their backups during the attack. In state and local government, media, leisure, and entertainment sectors, that number jumps to 99 percent.

Create (or Update) Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Backups aren’t of any value if you don’t have a way to recover the data they hold. And time is of the essence when your data isn’t available. So, take the time this month to review or create your disaster recovery plan. Find a step-by-step guide to creating a disaster recovery plan here.

Invest in Appropriate Backup Technologies

Every organization is unique, with its own requirements for how long it can afford to have its data unavailable and how much data it can afford to lose—your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs). By working with an expert Arcserve technology partner, you’ll have access to the experience and guidance you need to choose the most effective backup—and disaster recovery—technologies and solutions for your organization.

Celebrate Backup Awareness Month by finding an Arcserve technology partner here. To learn more about Arcserve products, request a demo.