{"id":7022,"date":"2021-06-20T13:28:26","date_gmt":"2021-06-20T11:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/?p=7022"},"modified":"2021-06-20T13:28:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-20T11:28:27","slug":"how-the-covid-19-pandemic-has-changed-the-backup-services-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-has-changed-the-backup-services-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the backup services industry."},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> 4<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n

The Covid-19 pandemic forced big changes in how people work \u2013 we look at impacts on backup, including increased reliance on the cloud, plus security and compliance vulnerabilities and ransomware<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Stephen Pritchard<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remote working is now a permanent arrangement for a growing number of businesses after the Covid-19 pandemic pushed organisations of all sizes to move to home working on a wide scale in a very short timeframe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a0impact on all areas of IT\u00a0has been huge, but arguably it is most acute in\u00a0backup and data protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the shift to remote working is no longer viewed as a temporary measure for dealing with public health restrictions. Management consulting firm McKinsey believes more than 20% of the workforce can operate as effectively from home as they would in the office. If employers allow it, it says four times as many people could work from home than in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impact of home working on IT systems is well documented. Businesses have had to\u00a0invest in laptops and tablets, and even printers, for remote staff. They have also had to re-engineer networks and applications to allow remote access on a large scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the move to remote working has forced organisations to revisit their\u00a0data protection and backup strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protected by being remote?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From a business continuity perspective, an organisation with a highly distributed workforce can be more resilient than one where the majority of employees are office-based. The obvious difference is that there is no need to invoke physical\u00a0disaster recovery (DR) planning, such as moving to emergency office space. As long as datacentre or cloud-based applications remain accessible, work carries on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But taking work off-premise forces changes to backup and recovery. Are\u00a0backup systems configured to run on remote devices? And do employees have enough bandwidth to run backup tools?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the start of the pandemic, organisations found the\u00a0bandwidth of their virtual private network (VPN) under stress, so they had to invest in improving capacity. Anecdotally, supporting technologies such as backup was viewed as less critical than line-of-business applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor remote workers, all of a sudden their home became their office. They may not even have had a desk for their laptop. These effects created a domino effect of networking, security and data protection consequences,\u201d says Christophe Bertrand, a senior analyst at ESG.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But although some organisations opted for local solutions for their backup needs \u2013 including USB sticks, hard drives or even employee-purchased online storage \u2013 Bertrand believes that Covid-19 has accelerated existing trends towards\u00a0cloud backup\u00a0and reliance on online office suites and software as a service (SaaS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Applications such as\u00a0Microsoft Office 365\u00a0became much more important during the pandemic,\u201d says Bertrand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five areas where the pandemic impacted backup<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1. Local backups, and data compliance<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Asking users to back up data locally to removable media is rarely an IT team\u2019s first choice, but during the pandemic, especially the first few weeks, it might have been the only option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not all network-based endpoint backup tools supported remote users, and those that did had to contend with limited bandwidth and rising demand for VPN access from other applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supplier support for remote users has improved over the past year, so IT leaders should check the features offered in their\u00a0backup software. They should also check licensing, to ensure their endpoints are covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once employees have moved to a secure, remote backup system, they should securely erase local backups to prevent a backup solution becoming a\u00a0data compliance\u00a0problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Protecting SaaS applications<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Software-as-a-service is one of the technologies that really helped organisations adapt to pandemic working. And backups for SaaS applications are becoming more important \u2013 Gartner says it accounts for a growing number of client enquiries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the past two years, infrastructure and operations leaders have begun to include SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365,\u00a0Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)\u00a0and\u00a0Salesforce\u00a0as a part of their backup strategy,\u201d says Gartner senior research director Santhosh Rao.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although users might assume \u201ccloud\u201d applications automatically back up their data, this is not the case. But suppliers are developing specific backup tools for SaaS, with Office 365 the best supported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Workspace and Salesforce backups are still \u201clargely a work in progress,\u201d notes Rao, but the pandemic has prompted suppliers to invest there too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Backing up to the cloud \u2013 and cloud-to-cloud backup<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Backing up user data to the cloud bypasses the\u00a0limitations of corporate VPNs\u00a0and avoids the data protection pitfalls of remote workers\u2019 local backups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to StorageCraft, part of Arcserve, 61% of UK IT decision-makers have increased their use of cloud backup services since the start of the pandemic. Another 28% say they rely increasingly on cloud services for data recovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic has undoubtedly forced CIOs\u2019 hands in the face of technical and compliance concerns. Backing up users\u2019 devices directly to the cloud should be more reliable, easier for employees and, with the right controls, compliant with data protection regulations. The option to back up to private cloud instances provides further assurance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But organisations are also looking at cloud-to-cloud backup. More on-premise suppliers now support backups for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), including cloud-native workloads and virtual machines, according to Gartner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

With the pandemic shifting more critical applications from the datacentre to the cloud, ensuring they are fully backed up is vital. As Gartner\u2019s Rao points out, this should also include\u00a0containerised workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backing up to the cloud also helps deal with another pandemic impact \u2013 IT staff no longer need to physically access the datacentre to manage storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Centralised backup management<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic, and the move to a more fluid and hybrid IT model, has increased workloads for IT teams. As a result, they need centralised tools that can protect data, regardless of location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This includes backing up user data directly to the public cloud and tiering data to the cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Gartner\u2019s Rao, most backup providers now support this. Using services such as\u00a0Amazon S3 and Azure Blob storage, as well as their long-term storage equivalents Glacier and Azure Archive Blob, can help businesses reduce storage costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Ransomware<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Ransomware attacks\u00a0have been another unfortunate feature of the pandemic that has affected enterprise backup strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to one research report, from IT security company\u00a0Bitdefender, ransomware increased by 485% in 2020. Covid-related phishing campaigns, and attacks on the pharmaceutical and health sectors, account for a large part of the rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But any organisation can be targeted by ransomware. As a result, CIOs and CISOs are looking again at \u201cimmutable\u201d storage,\u00a0including tape\u00a0and\u00a0Worm-type devices. Meanwhile, backup providers are developing ransomware detection, immutable snapshots \u2013 potentially in the cloud \u2013 and \u201cclean copy\u201d recovery techniques to allow organisations to recover their data safely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security experts warn that ransomware will continue to be a threat, even when the pandemic is under control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> 4<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>The Covid-19 pandemic forced big changes in how people work \u2013 we look at impacts on backup, including increased reliance on the cloud, plus security and compliance vulnerabilities and ransomware By Stephen Pritchard Remote working is now a permanent arrangement for a growing number of businesses after the Covid-19 pandemic pushed organisations of all sizes to move to home working<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,7,109,155,38,35,8,258,62,69,4,30,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archiving-and-backup","category-backup-and-archival-tools","category-backup-and-recovery-software","category-batting-for-tech-in-the-covid-19-times","category-best-practices-for-data-center-operations","category-data-center-facilities","category-data-center-hardware","category-data-protection-backup-and-archiving","category-data-storage-backup-tools","category-data-storage-backup-tools-backup-and-archival-tools","category-datacenter-news","category-expert-advise-and-opinion","category-industry-news-and-expert-advise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7023,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7022\/revisions\/7023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}