In celebration of #WorldBackupDay2019 on March 31, I spoke with Veritas’ Elias AbuGhazaleh, Director of Customer Engagement, and a leader in Veritas’ Customer and Partner Engagement Program.
At Veritas, we regularly talk about backup and recovery at an enterprise-level—think, maintaining terabytes over megabytes—so I wanted to understand how Veritas’ approach to data resiliency could apply to day-to-day life.
What are the backup topics top-of-mind for today’s IT leaders?
“Backup” is such an old school term. As part of my role here at Veritas, our Customer Engagement team is in constant communication with IT leaders via our Customer & Partner Engagement Program. Yes, we hear the word “backup," but as the conversation goes on, you quickly realize that is the word they use which means a dozen other things—plus things they often don’t know they mean. It is no longer enough to just backup (create copies of) data. Users must ask:
- Am I protected? With today’s diverse platforms that have been adopted by enterprises to host data, physical/virtual/cloud, ensuring that you are able to know where your digital data resides is important, but also can you get to it to back it up.
- What am I protecting? Not only is the ability to protect digital data a top-of-mind topic, but managing and understanding that data is key to business success. As backup windows become shorter and shorter, the ability to “backup everything, every day” is no longer an option. Storage is not free, and neither is maintaining that storage. Enterprises have to adhere to storage policies they may have, or abide by laws related to digital storage—so not only do they think about doing a backup they also have to address the ability to access the backup and understand what it is.
- Is it secure? We have all read about the many articles citing data breaches, stolen identities, leaked consumer data or the various malware or ransomware stories that companies have fallen victim to. It isn’t just enough to have a backup of your data in the case of accidental data deletion, natural disasters, or a variety of other reasons that data becomes unavailable. IT leaders also want to ensure that their backup is also secure—again regardless of where the data is stored.
Can you explain the benefits of building a comprehensive data protection strategy?
Having a comprehensive data protection strategy is the norm now. Having one does not immediately protect you from data loss (regardless of how it happens), that is why the strategy must be reviewed and renewed constantly.
Things change very fast for our IT leaders, and they have to maintain the ability to change before they are forced to.
Don’t just build a comprehensive data protection strategy of what you will do to protect your data, make sure that you are also building in corrective methods for dealing with things when things don’t go as planned.
Please share something inspiring about working in data management and protection at Veritas Technologies.
I’ve been fortunate to work for a data protection company that does not only provide data protection software, but broader solutions that address all that accompanies data management.
The product portfolio at Veritas has enabled me to help solve issues today's IT leaders didn’t know they have, and this makes me smile.
Any closing thoughts you would like to share?
Protect your data! World Backup Day is that one day a year reminder to backup your important data, just in case you have not done so. World backup day is also that one day a year that my job makes sense to my family—or they pretend it does, I haven’t figured out which yet.
Typically I hear “Dad, I don’t have enough room on my iPhone, can you backup my pictures." The next five minutes are spent explaining that moving pictures from the iPhone to a laptop is not considered a backup. Copying the pictures to the laptop, now that is a backup, but then you will still not have enough room on the iPhone.
Then after the lecture, I start the work of a hero—because a teenager without the ability to take a picture on Snapchat/Instagram/FB or whatever else they use these days is like the end of the world, and my action will save her from the end of the world; thus I’m a hero!
Now as I’m copying the pictures and monitoring progress, I’m asking, “Why in the world do you need 17 pictures of your cat yawning?” The unspoken response I usually get is a look of, “I can explain it to you but you won’t understand." Then I have to remind myself I’m not at work, I’m not talking to an IT leader, and the iPhone and Laptop are not a big enterprise environment.
So take the pledge from World Backup Day, please, but also build that comprehensive data protection plan and put it in use.
