World Backup Day is here again – but why are we still celebrating it?

Author: Beatrice

By Chris Addis, Vice President of Sales in the UK and EMEA at Nasuni.

The days of traditional file backup will soon be long gone; that is why we called for an end to World Back Up Day 10 years ago. Should we also be celebrating other archaic technologies on “World Floppy Disk Day” or ‘‘World Fax Day’’? A ‘realistic’ celebration party for backup would probably entail starting a few hours or days later than planned, and the cake would have a few slices missing! The vast majority of IT professionals we talk to want to get rid of backup and its associated headaches and challenges. 

Even in the age of cloud, cyber security threats associated with data such as ransomware are becoming more severe and frequent (one happening every 11 seconds), forcing businesses to think differently about their data infrastructure and give more consideration to disaster recovery plans. Traditional backup technology is evolving, but even cloud solutions have major flaws.

The challenges don’t end there. While centralised enterprise backup systems can ingest unstructured data from dozens or hundreds of sites, they typically utilise central media servers that dedupe and compress the data. When a single site goes down, that backup server can restore the data and access within a business day or so. But if an event impact’s multiple locations, the central backup server can only manage a couple location restores at a time, meaning that time to recover (RTO) can easily increase from a few hours to multiple days, even weeks. 

That’s why we’ve created a cost-efficient cloud replacement for traditional network attached storage (NAS) and file server silos, consolidating file data in easily expandable cloud object storage. This way, enterprises can restore millions of lost files or folders in under a minute. Many of our customers across industries end up coming to us simply because they’re fed up with their backup and the ‘unglamourous’ work that is required for it – by leveraging file data services they can eliminate the need for complex legacy file backup and disaster recovery infrastructure.