What comes to your mind when you hear #Fridaythe13th? Well, first of all, we are not the part of western world. Friday the 13th is an unlucky day as per western superstition. For them, 13th day of the month of Gregorian calendar when falls on a Friday, is unlucky. Usually, #Fridaythe13th occurs at least once in each year. It can up to occurring thrice in a year too depending on the mood of Fridays, number 13, and the Gregorian calendar settings.
We do follow Gregorian calendar but, I, personally, don't belive #Fridaythe13th as a sign of bad luck or an indication of a misfortune. Being a tech professional, and running a tech company, I belive, the worst misfortune in today's world for any individual or organization is facing an outage, disaster, or ransomware attack. Worst of all, on top of that, would be learning the hard way that the Backups you were taking so religiously (I am sure, everyone does that), is corrpted, lost, locked, inaccessible, or missing.
Consequently, and with a mix of irony, some wise people named #Fridaythe13th as #VerifyYourBackupsDay #InternationalVerifyYourBackupsDay. That makes a lot of sense, western or eastern, all parts of the world. While, I was reading about data and its importance in today's Technology driven world, I came across two very important quotes which are quite relevant to the topic. Here are those interesting and right to the point quotes by Surya Varanasi, CTO of StorCentric, and JG Heithcock, General Manager of Retrospect, a StorCentric company.
JG Heithcock -
"The truth is that backup is easier said than done -- done well, anyway. My advice would be to choose a backup solutions provider with vast experience, as well as a track record for continuous innovation that ensures its offerings are prepared to meet prevailing conditions. The solution(s) should provide broad platform and application support, and ensure protection of every part of your IT environment, on-site, remote, in the cloud and at the edge.
Next, there must be an intentional and consistent dedication to verifying your backups. You can do this manually (not easy, not fun, error-prone), or there are add-on solutions (expensive, time-consuming to manage), or you can choose a backup solution that verifies your backup automatically. In other words, the backup solution should auto-verify the entire backup process, checking each file in its entirety to ensure the files match across all environments, and you are able to recover in the event of an outage, disaster or cyber-attack.
And, as a last but highly critical step -- at least one backup should be immutable -- unable to be altered or changed in any way, at any time. Even, if the ransomware took a ride along with your data during the last backup.
Backup is one thing, but recovery is everything."
Surya Varanasi -
“The traditional storage system game plan is to have the storage on-site, snap-shot the data, replicate to an off-site location, store it to a disk, and then move it to tape storage or the cloud. This makes your storage system predictable and vulnerable to external threats because bad actors anticipate your backup strategy. Cyber attackers can then rather easily use ransomware to infiltrate your network and compromise your login credentials, and render your backups useless.
What is required is an elevation in backup strategy from basic to unbreakable. In other words, for today’s ransomware threat what’s needed is to make backed up data immutable, thereby eliminating any way it can be deleted or corrupted. The ideal Unbreakable Backup can do just that by creating an immutable, secure format that also stores the admin keys in another location entirely for added protection. And, by layering-on a backup solution that has built-in verification, savvy SysAdmins can alleviate their worry about their ability to recover — and redirect their time and attention to activities that more directly impact their organization’s bottom-line objectives.”
#VerifyYourBackupDay #Fridaythe13th #InternationalVerifyYourBackupsDay
This post is a part of #BlogchatterHalfMarathon hosted by Blogchatter
