Enterprises Earn a ‘C’ Grade in Backup

This World Backup Day, businesses have some work to do on the data protection front.

After evaluating the results of a survey of 710 internet users, CloudBerry Lab, a provider of file management and cloud backup services for small and midsized businesses, gave enterprises a “C” grade for their data backup practices. According to the company, businesses are falling short on some critical fronts.

In email remarks sent to InfoStor, Alexander Negrash, director of marketing at CloudBerry Lab, noted that “only 24 percent of companies have 3 or more copies” of their data. “Most of the companies don’t follow the best practices ‘3-2-1 backup’ rule. A 3-2-1 strategy means having at least three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different mediums, and at least one copy offsite.”

Many organizations are taking other dangerous shortcuts. “Forty-four percent of companies back up to external drives, which means that they can’t follow the ‘3-2-1 backup’ best practice.”

A majority of businesses, ill-informed about cloud security, are turning their backs to a potentially powerful ally in the battle against data loss. “Fifty-six percent of companies are not really educated about the security measures that can be taken in the cloud – encryption in transit, encryption at rest. So they fear of cloud backup because of security measures,” added Negrash.

Distressingly, nearly half of respondents (46 percent) said they don’t rely any sort of data backup measures. And many have suffered the consequences. Nearly a third (32 percent) of business users said they had suffered data loss at least once and over a quarter (26 percent) of consumers reported the same.

On the bright side, businesses data winds up getting backed up more often compared to personal data, CloudBerry found. Business users with automated backup processes outpace consumers by 11 percent. Compared to consumers, businesses also conduct daily backups more often by a 20-point margin.

After external drives, the cloud is the second most popular backup destination among both businesses (35 percent) and consumers (43 percent). In total, cloud backup usage is up 13 percent compared to last year.

A separate survey from backup software maker Acronis also revealed that about a third of consumers (34 percent) experienced data loss. Nearly 27 percent of consumers don’t backup their data, making them prime targets for ransomware.

Among those polled by Acronis, most hadn’t heard of ransomware (62 percent). Generally, consumers value their personal documents, pictures, videos and other data (67 percent), the study revealed. Nearly six percent said they were prepared to part with at least $500 to recover data lost to ransomware or other mishaps.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.