Today, March 31, is World Backup Day. It slides in just in time, right before April Fools. Which doesn’t spare us from the April Fools punchlines, sadly, with the case in point being the World Backup Day mantra: Don’t be an April Fool. Be prepared. Back up your files on March 31.
When we think about backing up data, we often think about it in the context of why it’s important for the average person. Which it is. No one wants to lose wedding or baby photos, carefully crafted resumes, or a portfolio of writing projects. But, have you ever thought about the challenges businesses must navigate when backing up data?
Says Entrust’s Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development John Grimm:
For consumers, backing up personal laptops and cell phones is a practice primarily driven by the desire to not lose irreplaceable items like family photos. And many easy-to-use cloud-based tools are available to accomplish the task. At the enterprise level, however, it’s a whole different ballgame. Sensitive data like customer information, intellectual property, and employee records are used and stored in more places than ever before. A good backup strategy balances the need to be able to recover in case of a system failure with the principle of not creating too many copies of the data, which can in turn increase the exposure to possible data breaches.
Used correctly, encryption is a critical component of a data protection strategy. An encryption strategy for both online and backup data is not complete without best-practice based key management that assures that keys are only available to authorized parties, are themselves kept encrypted and separate from the data they protect, and also are not lost which would render encrypted data unrecoverable.
For more information on how Entrust empowers businesses to protect critical data, check out our product page.
