Celebrating the Final World Backup Day

Nine years ago, Reddit users developed World Backup Day to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining regular, secure data backups. Since then, we’ve been ardent supporters of the annual event and have joined influencers and organizations from across the world to help amplify this message.

But, along the way, a lot has changed. Even now, the nature of work is shifting to remote devices in home offices around the globe. Amidst all this change it shouldn’t be a surprise that traditional data protection solutions and approaches aren’t enough to face today’s threats. Individuals and companies alike must expand their focus and embrace what IDC calls the new IT discipline: cyber protection, which combines backup and security.

In short: Backup is dead – today we need more. And for the same reason, we need more than a single World Backup Day. That’s why we’re expanding World Backup Day into World Cyber Protection Week: March 30 through April 3.

The community that originally created World Backup Day envisioned the event as “a reminder to save all your cherished pictures, videos, and other important data to somewhere secure.” The trouble is, traditional backups don’t provide the level of security they once did because of three central challenges that have emerged in recent years.

When World Backup Day launched, cloud computing was just beginning to rise. The amount of data you rely on at home and at work is more than it was at any point in history. The variety of devices used to create, access, and store that data is growing, as well. Simply put, your digital world is increasingly complex – as is the process of protecting it.

Legacy backup solutions aren’t equipped to keep pace with this accelerated scale and complexity, forcing users to choose between a makeshift patchwork of solutions or a greater risk of security vulnerabilities on the platforms, applications, and devices where existing backup solutions can’t go.

While protecting your data has become harder – particularly with an increase in COVID-19 remote working procedures, the cybercriminals that are trying to access it have become smarter. You just have to watch the news (or read the Acronis blog) to know that ransomware, phishing, and data breaches are growing in frequency and severity. Today, cybercriminals can specifically target and eliminate backups, even corrupting backup software so the files they create are invalid to help ensure a payday and rake in millions as a result.

With more sophisticated cybercrimes and the constant development of new, unforeseen strains, you can’t count on the same old anti-virus and backup solutions to have you covered the way they used to. Today, your best defense is a good offense through modern, proactive anti-malware solutions that can monitor your system and close gaps in your protection posture before they’re exploited.

Unsurprisingly, managing a larger quantity of data, a larger quantity of devices, and a larger variety of solutions to protect it all gets expensive. And while some organizations are increasing their IT budgets in response, many are not. This leads smaller businesses and individual, personal users to compromised, incomplete protection and larger organizations to training and maintenance costs that can quickly slow growth and reduce revenue.

Traditional solutions don’t address this challenge, offering siloed protection for specific devices, platforms, and use cases, instead of an integrated approach that unifies – and thereby simplifies – solution management.

World Cyber Protection Week takes the essential, natural next step from World Backup Day. From March 30 – April 3, we’re raising awareness of and engagement with the modern cyber protection approach that overcomes these challenges and ensures that the data that matters most to you is kept safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure.

To do that, we’ll be taking a look back at the history of data backup and storage, unveiling the results of a global survey, offering discounts on some of our industry-leading cyber protection solutions, and announcing the release of an all-new, integrated cyber protection solution: Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.

We invite you to join in the celebration, keep an eye out for all these events, and help spread the word about the first-ever World Cyber Protection Week with #CyberProtection and #CyberFit.