StorageCraft makes a good point. We already have World Backup Day (31 March), but that's only half of the story.

Backup is a good thing, but it is of no value unless you know you can recover the data when you need to.

When did you last recover data from a backup, whether that was in earnest or as a drill?

According to research performed by Dimensional Research for StorageCraft (709 IT decision makers form companies with 100 - 2,500 employees), nearly 25% of organisations with a recovery plan do not test it, and 44% test it once a year or less often.

Furthermore, 38% mistakenly believe their public cloud services provider is responsible for data and application recovery in case of a ransomware attack or data loss.

"It's one thing to have a plan, it's another to know that it works," StorageCraft ANZ director Leo Lynch told iTWire.

“The business problem is no longer ‘if’ but ‘when’ and ‘how’ will a data outage happen," he said.

"Data backup is absolutely important, but today, it’s simply table stakes. The most important question to ask is ‘how fast will we recover?’ and then to validate the answer.

"With the introduction of World Data Recovery Day, we want to work with other industry leaders to raise urgent awareness that we are now in the ‘recovery era’!

"Our goal is to provide a focal point to educate IT leaders worldwide on best practices that help organisations ensure they are adequately prepared to deal with a possible – and likely – failure of their IT infrastructure.“

StorageCraft serves around 30,000 ANZ customers through its 4500-strong reseller network, mostly managed service providers.

The company has products and services for backing up servers, PCs (including the OneXafe Solo 300 to protect a desktop or laptop used by a remote worker, of which there are many more around these days), cloud servers, and certain SaaS products.