June is Backup Awareness Month: Are Your Backups Secure?

According to VPN provider Surfshark, 41.6 million accounts were leaked due to breaches in the first quarter of 2023 alone. And ransomware attacks hit 66 percent of organizations in the prior year, according to Sophos’ The State of Ransomware 2023. The same report found that the average ransom came in at a breathtaking $1.82 million. Meanwhile, the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 82 percent of breaches involved the human element. 

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

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 stored offsite in the cloud or secure storage
• Store one copy of your backups in an immutable format, where your backup data is converted to a write-once-read-many-times format that can't be altered or deleted. 

Immutability is different from data encryption in that there is no key, so there should be no way to “read” or reverse the immutability.

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. We’ve created a step-by-step guide to creating a disaster recovery plan you can find 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 (recovery time objective or RTO) and how much data it can afford to lose (recovery point objective or RPO). 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.

Find an Arcserve technology partner here. To learn more about Arcserve products, request a demo.