Five critical questions to ensure your business continuity on World Backup Day
28 March 2025
By Jenna Polson | Uncategorized | No Comments
Imagine opening your laptop to find your inbox empty, your applications locked up, and your team idle. If everything was lost, how long could it take you to recover? What could it cost?
Business continuity is an uncomfortable topic to face, but that’s nothing compared to facing it too late. As the trusted IT managed service provider to hundreds of Australian businesses, we see this play out. When things go wrong, well-designed solutions allow businesses to seamlessly side-step disaster and keep moving forward.
March 31st is World Backup Day, and while its meaning has evolved with technology over the years, its observance has never been more important to businesses. In fact, financial industry authority APRA singled-out backups as a particular weakness in 2024, writing to regulated entities to urge a review of their systems and practises.
Without current and tested backup and restoration solutions in place, you won’t meet the entry-level Essential Eight standard, cyber insurance requirements, or even common clauses in modern B2B service agreements.
Get started today, by working through these five critical questions with your leadership team.
‘Backup’ means something different today
When World Backup Day was established in 2011, a responsible level of backup meant copying data onto an external drive and taking it home each night. Today, that solution just doesn’t cut it. Here’s why:
- Increased cyber threats: The threats to your business assets are more severe and more prevalent than ever. Often, they’re not only targeting your data, but your whole IT system.
- Growing complexity: As your tech stack becomes more complex, so do your backup and restoration needs. Each new application introduces more nuance to be considered.
- Costly downtime: Business downtime is more expensive, especially if you have teams and customers distributed across time zones. Restoring to a minimum viable operating state as quickly as possible can curtail both direct financial losses and reputational damage.
Backup today must extend beyond data to consider its interplay with your broader IT environment. Because what good is data if it’s corrupted, incomplete, or you have nowhere to restore it to?
The 5 critical questions to consider this World Backup Day
There’s a challenging trade-off between your level of IT investment and the confidence it provides. Working through these five questions will help identify the right fit for your business today. Take this list to your leadership team to hash out their priorities and perspectives. Then talk to your IT provider about whether your current solutions are well-matched for your business needs in the current technology environment.
1. How long can you afford to be down?
Think through the direct financial, opportunity, and reputational costs of pausing operations. Imagine paying for assets you can’t use, your staff at minimum productivity levels, and your customers waiting. At what point is the cost too much? This length of time is known as your Recovery Time Objective.
Consider the stages of recovery you may need to step through over time. IBM’s 2024 report found that most businesses take longer than 100 days to fully recover from a data breach.
2. What do minimum viable business operations look like?
Some businesses could operate for a few days with just webmail and a laptop. Others rely on a business application so heavily that its absence for an hour would be dire. Identify what you’re willing to pay to protect.
It’s also important to check your dependencies on cloud-based applications; even Microsoft recommends using third-party and offline solutions to backup and restore data in their platforms.
3. What statutory record keeping requirements apply?
In regulated industries, such as finance and health, a license to operate is conditional on maintaining historical datasets. But unregulated businesses aren’t off the hook. All Australian businesses have record-keeping requirements, securing financial records for five years, and employee records for seven. This may justify specifying different retention policies for different datasets.
4. What historical data can I afford to lose?
If you could send and receive email today, but didn’t have access to your past conversations, what would that mean for you and your team? If your backup runs every day at 5pm, how would a 4:30pm disaster feel? Your Recovery Point Objective is the age of the historical data that you could do without.
Both your Recovery Time and Point Objectives are critical inputs for the data retention policies your IT provider configures.
5. Can you be confident your solution actually works?
It would be devasting to invest in solutions that let you down when it matters most. A full disaster recovery scenario should be played out at least once a year for every business. This doesn’t mean just testing a sample of backup data, because there are plenty of potential failure points. The only way to gain true confidence is by restoring your full IT environment onto new hardware. At Bigfish Technology, that’s our standard approach.
Here’s the good news
While IT threats are becoming more sophisticated, so are the solutions to combat them. Highly targeted, automated and adaptable solutions improve your protection levels with less effort from you. Businesses utilising automated and AI-powered defence solutions report faster data breach identification and lower impact cost than those without.
So, this World Backup Day, take a moment to check that your IT business continuity solutions are well-matched to the current threat environment and your business needs.
