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With around 2.5 quintillion bytes worth of data being generated each day and over 44 zettabytes of data in the entire digital universe, it is no surprise that data backup has become an essential cybersecurity layer. However, as technologies like cloud and AI are rapidly increasing data creation and usage the data landscape continues to grow exponentially.

"When World Backup Day was created in 2011,1.8 zettabytes of data existed across the globe. By 2020, that number increasednearly 200%. While data backup remains an essential cybersecurity layer, the data landscape continues to grow exponentially. Technology like cloud and AI are rapidly increasing data creation and usage. This means organizations must alter how they think about data, including what information is preserved. World Backup Day is the prime moment for initiating this change.

"Backups are required for businesses to be responsive and nimble in the event of a ransomware attack or disaster. However, they should not be done blindly. Otherwise, resources and bandwidth will become overwhelmed; an organization also puts itself at compliance risk. In today’s data-rich environments, data discovery and protection are key to understanding data and its risk level.

"By prioritizing data privacy and hygiene, organizations can elevate their security posture by going beyond information preservation and disaster recovery. Data analysis, for example, can identify data redundancies and inefficiencies, decreasing the overall amount of data that needs to be preserved and reducing an organization’s data footprint. Privacy-enhancing technologies take this a step further, helping to minimize data usage while also encouraging sustainability, ethical information use and ensuring regulatory and auditory compliance. Technologies like data masking, tokenization and encryption can also protect the privacy of individuals and secure critical information while preventing the over-retention of data. Coupling data hygiene with privacy-enhancing technologies like these can allow an organization to preserve only the necessary data. As a result, they can reduce data backup spend and more effectively implement security measures, such as encryption and access controls, to protect the remaining sensitive information."