As the world observes World Backup Day on March 31, industry leaders are calling for a shift in approach from simple data backup to a broader focus on cyber resilience. This year’s theme, “From Backup to Cyber Resilience”, reflects the growing understanding that just storing data copies is no longer enough in today’s digital environment. With rising cyber threats, increasing data volumes, and more complex IT systems, organisations are now being urged to build systems that ensure not just backup, but also fast recovery, security, and continuity of operations.
According to Srinivas Rao, Managing Director – India at Lenovo ISG, data resilience has become critical as businesses adopt artificial intelligence and operate across distributed environments: “As enterprises across India accelerate their AI journeys, data resilience has become fundamental to business continuity and long-term growth. With the rise of real-time inferencing and distributed environments spanning edge, data center, and hybrid multi-cloud, ensuring data availability, integrity, and rapid recovery is more critical than ever. Cyber threats, system failures, and human errors constantly put businesses at risk, making backup a strategic priority rather than a reactive measure. Lenovo’s data protection offerings help enterprises streamline, simplify, and automate backup and recovery, combining AI-driven resilience, Zero Trust security, and immutable storage to safeguard against evolving threats. By enabling faster recovery, minimizing downtime, and optimizing infrastructure efficiency, Lenovo ensures organizations can build secure, scalable data foundations and innovate with confidence while protecting their most valuable asset – ‘data”.
Echoing similar concerns, Suvabrata Sinha, CISO in Residence at Zscaler, highlighted that cyber attackers are increasingly targeting backup systems themselves Hackers and bad actors are leveraging AI and becoming more effective and vicious. Post compromise, they are not only encrypting data stores and key systems for ransom, they are also locking up the backup repositories to prevent any attempted recovery without paying ransom. This reinforces an important reality for World Backup Day backup is essential, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. Organizations must not only ensure recovery and restoration systems will work when needed but also maintained with an equivalent level of security. The Zero Trust architecture must be extended to the backup management systems and backup data stories. Zscaler offers the full suite of zero trust controls like segmentation, traffic inspection and Data Loss Prevention that allows organisations to enable companies to achieve both a high level of resilience as well as a high level of security.”
Avaneesh Vats, Vice President – Information Technology at Techno Digital, said backup can no longer be treated as just a safety layer: “Backup was once treated as an insurance layer. Today, it is a test of how resilient your entire infrastructure really is. As data volumes grow and workloads become more distributed across core and edge environments, the question is no longer whether data is backed up. It is whether it can be recovered reliably, quickly, and under real-world stress conditions. In many cases, failures are no longer limited to system outages or cyber incidents. They are driven by infrastructure dependencies power disruptions, network instability, regional outages, or even external geopolitical factors. Backup strategies that are not designed for this reality tend to fail when they are needed the most. This is why backup must evolve from a storage construct to a resilience architecture. It needs geographic distribution, isolation from primary systems, regular validation, and alignment with infrastructure that guarantees uptime, latency consistency, and operational predictability. At Techno Digital, we see backup and recovery as outcomes of disciplined infrastructure design. As India’s data center ecosystem scales, resilience will not be defined by how much data is stored, but by how confidently it can be restored under pressure, at scale, and without compromise.”
Piyush Agarwal, SE Leader, India, Cloudera, said: ”As World Backup Day and World Cloud Security Day approach, the real question is not whether organizations are backing up more data or adding more cloud security controls. It is whether those investments are improving business resilience in a way that is economically sustainable. Backup cannot be treated as an insurance policy that simply expands indefinitely. Without clear retention policies and strong governance, data resilience programs become financially draining, operationally burdensome, and harder to justify. The priority should be protecting the right data, at the right level, for the right recovery outcomes when disruption hits. At Cloudera, we believe World Backup Day and World Cloud Security Day should be a reminder that resilience in modern enterprises is not about creating more copies of everything or piling on controls. It is about making intentional decisions for secure and efficient data management, so organizations avoid carrying an ever-expanding bill for data that is redundant, obsolete, trivial, or simply unknown.”
Bhavyan Mehta, Vice President – Engineering, Commvault, said: “Backups were traditionally designed to restore data after failure, but in today’s environments, recovery is no longer that straightforward. As organizations in India scale across cloud and hybrid infrastructures, data is constantly changing, distributed, and increasingly targeted by AI driven threats. In many cases, by the time an issue is detected, data and recovery points may already be impacted, making it difficult to determine what can be reliably restored. This becomes more critical with the rise of AI and data intensive workloads, where the integrity of data directly affects outcomes. Recovery is not just about retrieving data, but ensuring that what is restored is accurate, consistent, and free from compromise. That requires a shift from traditional backup thinking to an engineering led approach focused on validation and recoverability at scale. World Backup Day is a reminder that resilience depends on how well recovery is designed and tested. Organizations need to ensure backups are isolated, immutable, and continuously validated, with the ability to identify trusted data and restore systems without reintroducing risk. Regular testing is essential to confirm that recovery workflows perform as expected under real world conditions. Ultimately, enterprises that prioritise data integrity and recovery readiness will be better positioned to maintain business continuity and operate with confidence when disruptions occur.”
Industry experts believe that as India’s digital ecosystem and data centre infrastructure continue to expand, the focus will increasingly shift towards building systems that can withstand disruptions and recover quickly.
