Due to the rise in cybercrime, particularly ransomware, and the errors that can afflict computers in general, maintaining data backups is a practice of importance within the world of business information technology (as well as being something of good practice for anyone who owns a computer).
For the past few years, World Backup Day has been marked on the last day of March. The concept was developed in order to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining regular, secure data backups.
There are many supporters of the annual event, including joined influencers and organisations from across the world who seek to amplify the core message.
The end of March is also a time when many information technology analysis organisations issue reports. One such organisation is Crucial.com, who have released a report that takes a deep dive into the impact of data breaches and data loss around the world.
The data-breach report names the U.S. the digital data theft capital of the world, outranking South Korea, Canada, and Australia. This may be reflective of the number of users and the focus of many attacks, rather than inherent weaknesses with U.S. security protocols in general.
Within the U.S., the nexus of cybercrime is California. This is the state with the largest cybercrime losses of $621.4 million for the past year.
In terms of the country featuring the fastest growth of cybercrime, the U.K. comes in at the unenviable number one spot. The U.K. experienced a 19.7 percent uplift in the cost of data breaches. This is the largest increase over the last two years
In terms of the current impact of criminal activity, the average global cost of a data breach has risen 9.8 percent from 2020 to 2021. The costs to an organisation can run into tens of thousands of dollars.
There are things, however, that an organisation can do with its computing devices to avoid breaches or losing data. One set of measures, appropriate to consider at this juncture, is data backups and having a system in place to recover and restore data.
There’s an old adage among information technology professionals that runs: A backup that you cannot reliably restore on demand isn’t a backup.
It follows that a key marker for any businesses affected by a cyberattack is in terms of how quickly lost data can be recovered and with when the business can begin to resume normal operations.
In this field there has been an advancement with the data protection tools required. This includes the adoption of newer technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, machine learning, and cloud computing.
