GPSJ - SPRING 2025 - Flipbook - Page 22
GPSJ
IT & IT SECURITY
Backing up data:
Avoid it at your peril
By Graham Jarvis, Freelance Business and Technology Journalist
Lead Journalist - Business and Technology, Trudy Darwin Communications
Backing up data is an essential practice in the digital age, ensuring that vital information is preserved and
can be restored in the event of data loss. Data can be lost due to hardware failures, cyberattacks, accidental
deletion or natural disasters.
“Without backups, organisations
put their ability to operate, the
昀椀nances, their customer and
partner relationships at risk, so
it is always better to invest in
solutions that enable an ability to
back up and restore data rapidly
– increasing the opportunity
more for service continuity than
disaster recovery,” explains
David Trossell, CEO and CTO of
Bridgeworks.
It’s very important time to back
up data, too. Data volumes in
2024 rose to 149 zettabytes, and
it’s set to rise by the end of this
year – 2025 – to 181 zettabytes.
Reports suggest that this
growth is driven by the Internet
of Things devices, real-time
data processing, cloud-based
storage, and generative AI is also
having an impact.
Drivers of data growth
Rivery - a platform that helps
build data pipelines - enables
companies to manage their data
and integrate it with their systems
more e昀케ciently. On its website,
it states:
“Arti昀椀cial intelligence is a
key driver of data growth,
with systems continuously
generating, processing and
manipulating vast datasets.
Machine learning algorithms,
natural language models and
generative AI tools produce large
volumes of data during training
and real-world operations.
Apps like automated content
creation, recommendation
systems, and AI-driven analytics
22
rely on constant feedback
loops to improve accuracy and
functionality- amplifying this
process.”
IDC also reports that these
global data volumes, which have
been generated within the past
2 years, are set to double every
4 years, with 90% of the world’s
data being created only within
the last couple of years.
Worryingly, IT support services
昀椀rm AAG IT Services, in its
‘The Latest 2025 Cyber Crime
Statistics (updated April 2025)’
report by Charles Gri昀케ths, points
out that 50% of UK businesses
experienced some form of cyberattack in 2023.
Average data breach cost
The average cost of a data
breach to businesses was
$4.88 million in 2024. The
report also says that around
1 in 10 US organisations have
no insurance against cyberattacks. Real estate investment
trust, Workspace Group, adds
that around 96% do not back
up their workstations. Studies
also suggest that many of the
organisations that do have
backup plans were often found
to have inadequate or 昀氀awed
backup practices, which can lead
to signi昀椀cant data losses.
With many organisations failing
to have a recovery process or,
more to the point - a service
continuity plan - Workspace
Group warns that “93% of
organisations without a recovery
plan face the threat of going
GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR JOURNAL SPRING 2025
out of business within a year
following a major data disaster.”
Trossell therefore warns:
“While backups can fail, which
may be due to poor practices
and policies, or using the wrong
technologies to back up data, it
is essential to undertake regular
backups and to have disaster
recovery as well as service
continuity in place.
This is to protect each and
every organisation from failures
to comply with data protection
and privacy regulations; and
to forestall any threat to their
existence.”
“I suggest that you try and
work in the theory that your
backup process should be
designed around your recovery
requirements,” he adds.
WAN Acceleration and
security
Regular backups, enhanced by
WAN Acceleration and stringent
cyber-security, mitigate these
risks by creating copies of data
that can be retrieved rapidly
when needed. Trossell says
the key factor in ensuring a
successful backup strategy is the
ability to also mitigate the e昀昀ects
of latency and packet loss. WAN
Acceleration, which is not to be
confused with WAN Optimisation,
enables this – and encrypted
data can be transmitted and
received rapidly and securely.
That’s what WANop just can’t
do. Trossell explains: “WAN
Optimisation just doesn’t live
up to expectations: To send
and receive data, it can’t be
encrypted; you have to have the
keys at each end to unencrypt it
before transmission.”
“WAN Acceleration solutions,
such as PORTrockIT, use arti昀椀cial
intelligence and machine learning
to mitigate the e昀昀ects of latency
and packet loss, as well as data
parallelisation to agnostically
send encrypted data over
thousands of miles, achieving
98% bandwidth utilisation. To
date, nothing else on the market
surpasses its performance.”
Even SD-WANs are boosted
with a WAN Acceleration overlay
and, while it’s tempting to save
money on backup solutions by
backing up data to, for example,
just one cloud storage facility and with prevention being better
than a cure - there is a need to
back up data in at least three
di昀昀erent locations and clouds.
This ensures that, no matter
what the cause of a data breach
or downtime, organisations
can maintain service continuity
and avoid data breach lawsuits
and 昀椀nes. Ideally, each disaster
recovery site should be located
outside of each one’s circles
of disruption – both onsite and
o昀昀site with an airgap to protect
the most sensitive data.
Cloud vulnerabilities
Trossell says that while cloudbased backups o昀昀er additional
security, they also have their
own weaknesses. For example,
because they operate 24/7 over
the course of each year, they
