Backup is dead. Long live backup!
The editor of Storage Newsletter created a few waves earlier this month when he wrote an opinion piece entitled ‘Backup is dead’. He made the point that backup today has no more interest and organizations only need replication.
I won’t go into the merits of replication and de-depulication of data and the benefits of backing up blocks rather than files (or the issues encountered when indexing and matching hashes), however I think that a statement like backup is dead is somewhat premature and way off the mark.
The point I want to make is that in many businesses, especially small and medium sized setups, backup has NOT even been born as a concept let alone a tried and tested strategy.
Many people and businesses do not backup their data or if they do, it’s a piecemeal affair, doing just enough (sic) to have a copy stored somewhere (insecurely, no doubt) and presumably updated whenever someone remembers to do another backup.
Far from ‘backup is dead’, I’d go as far as stating that ‘backup does not exist’ in many organizations. Businesses admit that data is important, they know that it’s the lifeblood of their organization but few get round to actually doing anything about it – products are too expensive, they have licensing issues, freeware versions have limitations, network-wide backups are complex… the list goes on.
A survey by Rubicon Consulting found that while small and mid-size businesses are grappling with explosive data growth, the backup processes they have in place often put that data at risk. The survey, also found that 92% of companies have deployed some form of data backup technology, yet 50% of them have lost data. Of the companies that lost data, approximately one-third lost sales, 20% lost customers, and one-quarter claimed the data loss caused severe disruptions to the company.
The survey also found that concerns about potential data loss run high among SMBs. Respondents rated backup as their second-highest computing priority, after defense against viruses and other malware, and ahead of issues like reducing costs and deploying new computers. Yet nearly one-third of SMBs surveyed do nothing to back up their data.
Those companies that do backup their data often focus on server-level backups but pay little attention to data stored on workstations… and there is a lot of corporate data lying around on employees’ machines.
Instead of haggling over which backup strategy is the right one, many businesses still need to get down to backing up their data. SMBs need to give data backup a priority listing and reduce the risk that something will go wrong (and it will!)
A few years ago, faxing was given up for dead too. Today, fax servers are still going strong. Now, backup is dead. Or so we’re being told.
You can be the judge of that!
About the Author: David Kelleher
David Kelleher is Director of Public Relations at GFI Software. With over 20 years’ experience in media and communications, he has written extensively for business and tech publications and is an editor and regular contributor to Talk Tech to Me.
EMC’s Chuck Hollis makes a good point about the column by Jean-Jacques Maleval in the Storage Newsletter. Hollis, in his Chuck’s Blog, notes sometimes outrageous statements are made to attract attention, to add to the noise level surrounding an issue rather than reducing it. That’s not entirely the case with Maleval’s column, but certainly the headline is deliberately designed to create controversy, which it seems to have done very effectively. Once that controversy dies down, though, backups will still be around, waiting to be pronounced dead another day.
“Far from ‘backup is dead’, I’d go as far as stating that ‘backup does not exist’”
As sad as that sounds, I have to agree with this kind of sentiment. With the explosion of necessary data in large corporations and SMBs, a lot of companies are shifting their focus on data gathering, collation, data basing and analysis. But very few resources are being poured into backing up all this information.
The fact that 92% of companies employ any sort of backup technology means that the idea of backing up critical data is a top priority for most companies. But the mere fact that 50% of them have lost it (or some amount of it) only goes to show that the backup systems being implemented are either inadequate, or inefficient.
Just because you’ve got seatbelts doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do without airbags.
@michael
Good observation. We’ve actually been conducting a lot of surveys to find out just how (and how often) back-ups are utilized by SMBs. What we discovered is pretty surprising. A majority actually have a back-up system in place. Unfortunately, this system is either outdated or, as you said, inefficient. Another is that most SMBs actually know the appropriate kind of back-up that ought to be utilized, but being completely satisfied with their current system, do not spend the resources to upgrade that system.