World Backup Day 2026: Expert Insights from the Field

Solutions Review’s Executive Editor Tim King compiled this roundup of World Backup Day quotes from experts for 2026, part of our ongoing coverage of the enterprise storage and data protection market. These insights originally appeared in Insight Jam, a community focused on the human impact of AI and the future of work and learning.

World Backup Day has quietly become one of the most revealing moments in enterprise technology. This has occurred not because of the reminders to “back up your data,” but because of what the people building the systems are now saying out loud. For years, backup lived in the background: a necessary, often underappreciated layer of IT hygiene.

But as ransomware escalates, regulatory pressure intensifies, and AI accelerates the volume and velocity of data creation, backup is no longer a back-office function. It is the last line of defense, the first step in recovery, and increasingly, the foundation of operational resilience. We’ve witness the evolution here at Solutions Review.

What’s changed is not just the stakes but the conversation. Vendors are no longer just talking about backup in terms of storage capacity or recovery time objectives alone. They are reframing it as a strategic control point in the modern enterprise: where data protection, security, compliance, and even AI readiness converge.

Backup is becoming less about copies of data and more about confidence in the business itself (confidence that systems can be restored), that operations can continue, and that organizations can withstand both known threats and the unknown disruptions still to come.

To capture this shift, we asked leading voices across the backup and data protection landscape to weigh in on what World Backup Day means today, and where it’s headed next. The result is a candid, forward-looking collection of perspectives from the vendor side of the market, offering a rare window into how the people closest to the technology see the future of resilience unfolding, at least as the chess board sits right now.

Note: World Backup Day 2026 insights are listed in the order we received them.

World Backup Day: Expert Insights for 2026

Dave Russell, Veeam

“With the rise of AI accelerating phishing and ransomware attempts, backup and recovery remains the most reliable safeguard for business integrity. In the AI era, businesses need continuous access to trusted data to serve as the last line of truth in the event that a single misconfiguration can cascade across an entire infrastructure in minutes. Without it, precious data is lost or corrupted, and the business cannot recover and resume operations.

Yet, according to the latest Veeam Data Resilience survey, nearly half of IT leaders are not confident they could recover all critical data within 24 hours of a major cyberattack or data loss event, and 76% of organizations say they would not survive more than three days of downtime.

Still, many are approaching risk in a reactive way, rather than building the kind of resilient, secure data foundation that enables both innovation and confidence at scale. The stakes are higher than most realize. World Backup Day is a timely call to action for boards and IT leaders to ensure data resilience and comprehensive backup strategies are in place.”

Justin Kappers, infoblox

“World Backup Day is a reminder that backups alone are not enough in the face of evolving cyber threats. The rise of AI-driven attacks demands advanced detection and response capabilities to ensure backup systems remain secure. Organizations must prioritize not just creating backups but also fortifying them against these increasingly sophisticated attacks.”

Corey Nachreiner, WatchGuard Technologies

“World Backup Day is an important reminder that data backup has evolved beyond an IT task to become a business and cyber resilience requirement. Data remains one of the most valuable and vulnerable assets for all organizations regardless of industry, and frequent, effective backups help reduce downtime, preserve operational continuity, support compliance obligations, and accelerate recovery after disruptive events. The most important message for this year’s World Backup Day is simple – preparedness only matters when recovery has been proven. You must do more than just back up your data. It is essential to test, protect, and prove recovery. The organizations that recover the fastest from attacks are those that already know their data is intact, easily accessible, and restorable.

A robust backup strategy is foundational for any modern enterprise, and it must include a clear recovery plan to ensure teams know which critical systems must be restored first when every minute matters. Just as important as the frequency and strategy is the quality of backups. It is essential to monitor backup status and perform periodic restoration tests, as the true value of a backup lies in its recovery speed and reliability under pressure. World Backup Day should serve as a moment to not only confirm the existence of backups, but also verify they work as intended.

It is imperative that we understand backups protect availability, but they do not ensure confidentiality. Encryption is a crucial first line of defense against unauthorized access and breaches, and backup data is no different. As ransomware increasingly combines operational disruption with data theft and extortion, organizations need to secure endpoints, identities, and sensitive data so threat actors cannot easily expose or monetize what they find.”

Nabil Hannan, NetSPI

“World Backup Day has traditionally highlighted recovery preparation, ensuring that organizations can restore data after cyberattacks, IT outages, or plain human error. While this still matters, in today’s AI era, simple backups are not enough to achieve business resilience. In relation to AI, what modern organizations face today is less of a new attack surface, but more of a new cocktail of familiar risks in different combinations and permutations, where exposed API keys, weak authentication and authorization, and overly permissive permissions are now embedded in autonomous systems that move faster and expand the blast radius significantly. The risk is that these systems can modify, move, or corrupt data without clear visibility, meaning organizations may not realize last-defense backups have been altered until it’s too late. To be resilient today, organizations must go beyond recovery and prove not only that backups exist, but that they remain trustworthy, and that systems cannot be manipulated to misbehave or cascade failures before security teams notice.”

Eric Schwake, Salt Security

“World Backup Day is an important reminder that resilience has become about more than just data recovery. In our increasingly API-driven and agentic world, sensitive data is increasingly dynamic and residing outside traditional backup ‘boundaries.’ Backups can help you recover what’s lost, but they can’t prevent exposure, misuse, or exfiltration as it happens. You need continuous visibility and governance across all application/API/agent connections. Otherwise, you’re just backing up data you’ve already lost control of.”

Shankar Gomathi, OpenText

“Why a CMDB is Ideal for Backup and Recovery

Although often viewed primarily as an IT operations tool, a CMDB is a powerful asset for backup and recovery. For IT Ops, a CMDB provides a single, accurate record of systems, configurations, and dependencies — functionality that can be easily leveraged for building comprehensive backup and recovery strategies and quickly executing when the need arises. Another compelling reason for using a CMDB is that it makes sense financially, as it likely already exists within an organization’s IT architecture.

Strategy and Planning

On the strategic front, a CMDB’s comprehensive content catalog can be a valuable resource for developing backup and recovery strategies. One of the driving forces is a CMDB’s impact analysis functionality, which strengthens backup planning by identifying high‑impact components whose failure would cascade across dependent systems. It will provide a clear picture during planning systems and applications necessary to restore normal operations and provide a checklist for rehearsals and plan activation.

Recovery Operations

The impact analysis insight provided by a CMDB is ideal during restoration efforts. By offering detailed attributes and relationships for every configuration item, a CMDB allows organizations to intelligently prioritize efforts. Teams are armed with knowledge about which business-critical systems should be restored first and the information needed to avoid inadvertent disruptions to systems that depend on those still being recovered.”

Rafael Narezzi, Centrii

“World Backup Day used to be about restoring files after an IT failure. In today’s energy environment, that mindset is dangerously outdated. As power generation becomes decentralized — across solar farms, microgrids, and distributed assets — we’re not just backing up data, we’re talking about maintaining continuity of physical operations. If an attacker disrupts an OT system, you’re not recovering documents — you’re losing megawatt-hours, breaching contracts, and triggering real financial and operational consequences in minutes.

The problem is that we’re building a massively distributed energy grid with security and resilience models designed for a centralized world. Every new connected asset expands the attack surface, yet very few organizations are quantifying what recovery actually looks like in this environment. Backup strategies need to evolve beyond data replication to include operational recovery — how quickly systems can be restored, how integrity is verified, and how to prevent compromised systems from coming back online. Without that shift, ‘backup’ becomes a false sense of security rather than a true resilience strategy.”

Geoff Anderson, Object First

“AI-powered cyberattacks have given World Backup Day’s 15-year mission a new sense of urgency. A recent survey of IT and security workers by Object First found that 89% say AI-powered attacks have increased their concern about data safety, yet only 58% are using immutable backup storage across all their data. Immutable storage — backup data that, once written, cannot be altered by anyone, even the most privileged admin — is the only way to guarantee a path to recovery from ransomware. This World Backup Day, we urge IT leaders to make backup data security a priority in the fight against AI cyber threats.”

Chris Bonavita, GTT

“World Backup Day – As enterprises adopt AI, their business data expands to include training datasets, model artifacts, and complex data pipelines. Those assets are often distributed across multiple cloud platforms and global infrastructure. Losing or corrupting them can disrupt critical services just as much as losing application data. World Backup Day highlights the growing need to think about resilience in terms of entire AI ecosystems, not just individual systems or storage environments.”

Skip Levens, Quantum

“World Backup Day is a great way to remind organizations of the importance of protecting their data – protecting it is integral to every organization’s mission – and like any important endeavor, it needs a great plan. In 2026, that reminder has never been more urgent, or more complicated.

Every workflow in every industry is increasingly AI amplified, and these workflows and models generate and need to be fed enormous quantities of data: training datasets, model snapshots, prompt logs, audit trails, massive telemetry trails that scale in petabytes. In fact, the notion of ‘data gravity’ is becoming a real engineering problem. Only well-designed, resilient and tiered storage architectures can ingest, move, and protect data at this scale and move it from ‘working’ to ‘standby’ repositories to match the workflows of the day.

For years, the default answer was spinning disk for everything. Need more capacity? Add more drives anytime you wish. But 2026 is exposing how fragile that assumption was. HDD manufacturers have told investors their production capacity is fully allocated through the rest of this year. Seagate and Western Digital are both emphasizing allocation discipline over volume expansion. When hyperscalers lock up supply, everyone else faces longer lead times, higher prices, and procurement uncertainty. Relying on a single storage tier seemed low-risk – but now it’s a critical gap.

Meanwhile, tape has been continuously innovating through all of this. LTO-10 delivers up to 40 terabytes of native storage per media cartridge. Retrieval performance has improved to the point where tape functions as an active tier in the data pipeline, not just a cold archive you hope you never need. If you think of tape as ‘what I send to the salt mine and never hope to need’, you’re missing out on this powerful storage capability that delivers resiliency and protection that is not possible on spinning hard drives or flash. For AI workloads that don’t require sub-second latency, tape lets organizations scale their data, maintain resilience against supply disruptions, and keep long-term costs under control.

On World Backup Day, cheers to you if you have a solid plan to keep your data ‘backed up.’ But the next question I hope you are ready for is whether your backup and protection architecture can handle what’s coming. Tape is a strategic necessity in a world where you need a storage tier that lets you keep scaling – without waiting for a disk allocation that may not come.”

Roland Rosenau, Quantum

“World Backup Day is a reminder that cyber resilience isn’t just about business continuity; it’s about preserving data that could shape your organization’s future.

In today’s AI era, data has become the most valuable competitive asset, and as cyberattacks continue to escalate, robust security measures are an essential piece of the data infrastructure. It’s no longer enough to focus solely on prevention; rather, organizations must focus on rapid recovery and resilience. That means layered protection and redundancy through various levels of infrastructure to safeguard critical data, including immutable, encrypted backups that remain secure even if primary systems are compromised.

Economical, scalable storage has become a form of insurance: the better you index, preserve, and protect your data today, the more valuable it becomes tomorrow. At the same time, however, data snapshots and redundancy remain essential for quick recovery in the event of a cyberattack or data loss, making current workflows resilient and ready for future use.”

Stephen Manley, Druva

World Backup Day: 3-2-1 Backup Survives – Context Makes it Resilient

“The 3-2-1 backup rule is still valid. Three copies, two media types, one offsite. Follow it. But if you think following it means you’re protected, that’s where the risk begins.

The threat landscape has shifted in three important ways. Attackers are using AI to defeat defenses at machine speed, which makes recovery a front-line capability, not an afterthought. Meanwhile, your own AI is creating exposure you can’t see because it is indexing content and generating copies across systems faster than any administrator can track. And your AI deployments themselves are now critical infrastructure; you have models, pipelines, and agents that need to be protected, recoverable, and compliant.

None of these threats can be addressed by backup volume or velocity alone. They require context. Context means three things in practice: application intelligence, identity intelligence, and data intelligence. With centralized metadata, you gain visibility into what exists, who touches it, and how it behaves, which turns data and identity sprawl from a liability into a strategic asset. With the appropriate centralized metadata, you can also use AI to detect anomalies, flag unusual access, and build recovery strategies proportional to actual risk.

3-2-1 tells you how to store your data. Context tells you what’s worth protecting and how to get it back. Modern resilience isn’t a checklist. It’s a continuous practice of understanding your applications, identities, and data, so when something goes wrong, you know exactly what you’re recovering and whether you can trust it.”

Kurt Markley, Apricorn

“World Backup Day 2026 Is About More than Backups

World Backup Day is a useful reminder to have a backup plan, but backups alone aren’t enough. For that plan to be effective, organizations also need a recovery plan, and that’s where many strategies fall short. Too often, having multiple copies of data is treated as the end goal, without considering how those copies are accessed, stored, and ultimately restored. The reality is that backups are now part of the attack surface. If they’re always connected, poorly segmented, or inconsistently managed across endpoints, they can be compromised just as easily as primary systems, leaving organizations with data they can’t reliably recover.

What’s changing is where risk is accumulating. Data is no longer centralized. It’s spread across remote devices, transient work environments, and portable storage that often sits outside of formal IT oversight. That creates gaps not just in protection, but in recoverability. Without clear policies around how data moves, where it’s stored, and who is responsible for securing it at each stage, organizations may believe they have a backup plan in place, but lack a recovery plan that will actually work when needed.

This is why backup strategies need to evolve from a static checklist to an operational discipline built around recovery. It’s not just about how many copies exist, but whether at least one is isolated from day-to-day network exposure and whether recovery has been validated under realistic conditions. World Backup Day is a valuable checkpoint, but the organizations that pair backup planning with disciplined, tested recovery planning will be the ones that can restore operations with confidence when something goes wrong.”

Elyse Gunn, Nasuni

“World Backup Day 2026 is a timely reminder that backup is not an isolated disaster recovery measure but rather a core part of practical cybersecurity resilience. Moreso, business continuity is entwined with business prosperity – every minute you are not operational is a minute of revenue lost. Your backup strategy must consider these realities. Backup should be automatic, and business continuity and disaster recovery should happen in seconds, not days.

As AI continues to accelerate the speed and sophistication of cyberattacks, organizations need to continuously adapt to protect and stay ahead of expanding threat landscapes.  Recent data highlights that  72% of organizations are seeing cyber risk increase, and 47% identifying adversarial generative AI as their primary concern. It’s more vital than ever that backup strategies do more than restore operations after an incident. They need to help protect the business from complex threats and support the overall security posture of the enterprise.

This principle is even more important, given AI is only as reliable as the data it leverages. Protecting data and its integrity and providing timely, clean dataset restorations are essential components of AI performance and security success. By treating backup as an ongoing organizational priority rather than a one-time initiative, companies can build stronger resilience as both structured and unstructured data continue to grow as a foundation of modern technology.”

Cynthia Overby, Rocket Software

“World Backup Day is a timely reminder that recovery readiness has become a defining measure of an organization’s resilience. As ransomware threats continue to evolve, 69% of IT leaders cite data privacy and security as their biggest concern when adopting AI, underscoring how central backup data has become the broader security equation.

Sensitive data does not lose its value or its risk once it moves into a recovery environment. Without the right controls in place, backup systems can introduce unnecessary exposure, expand privileged access, and complicate response efforts when speed and precision matter most.

True resilience goes beyond simply maintaining a backup. It requires a strategy that ensures data is secure, governed, and readily recoverable across hybrid environments, from mainframe to cloud. Consistent controls, strong access discipline, encryption, and well-defined recovery processes are essential to limiting risk while keeping critical data available.

For organizations running mission-critical infrastructure, backup is no longer just about restoring systems after disruption. It plays a central role in maintaining continuity, supporting security objectives, and ensuring the business can recover quickly and operate with confidence in the face of constant threats.”

Carolyn Duby, Cloudera

“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.

When governance priorities are unclear, many organizations default to keeping and backing up data “just in case.” Over time, that approach creates large volumes of information that provide little operational value. Research from the Veritas Global Databerg Report suggests that up to 85 percent of stored data may be dark or redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT). Yet organizations still store and protect this data, expanding backup sets and increasing recovery complexity. Larger backup environments require more data to be validated and restored before trusted operations can resume. The impact extends beyond infrastructure costs.

Governance strategies only matter if they produce reliable recovery outcomes. Regular restore and disaster recovery testing validates whether protection tiers actually match business priorities. These tests often surface critical insights, such as data that was backed up but did not contribute to recovery, or systems that require stronger protection than originally assumed. They can also expose hidden dependencies across data pipelines, where data lineage helps teams restore in the right order to resume trusted operations without restoring everything.

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, governed decisions so organizations avoid carrying an ever-expanding bill for data that is redundant, obsolete, trivial, or simply unknown.”

Brad Warbiany, WD

“World Backup Day is a useful reminder, but for enterprise and data center operators, the conversation has moved well beyond backup. The real focus today is data resilience: the ability to ensure that critical data remains durable, accessible and protected against an increasingly complex threat landscape.

AI is fundamentally changing the nature of enterprise data. Organizations are no longer just storing data. They are managing a continuously expanding asset base of inference logs, model checkpoints, synthetic datasets and telemetry streams that compound in volume with every cycle of refinement. The value of any given dataset may not be fully understood until years after it was created.

This is where storage architecture becomes a strategic decision. Ransomware resilience, data immutability and air-gapped architectures are no longer optional considerations for diligent enterprise infrastructure teams. They are foundational requirements. At the same time, the economics of protecting data at scale demand intelligent tiering. Storing everything on high-performance flash is financially unsustainable. High-capacity HDDs remain the backbone of cost-efficient, scalable data resilience strategies, and can provide the density and throughput economics that allow enterprises to retain data long enough to realize its full value.

World Backup Day is an opportunity to pressure-test those strategies. Are retention policies aligned to AI workload realities? Are immutability and ransomware protection built into the architecture, not bolted on? Is the cost per terabyte of long-term retention sustainable at the scale AI demands?

The enterprises that answer those questions with confidence today will be the ones best positioned to turn their data into a competitive advantage tomorrow.”

Ravit Sadeh, CTERA

“The “digital insurance” metaphor for backups is more relevant than ever, but the real question is the quality of the policy. For years, a basic policy was enough. Today, with ransomware everywhere, that’s no longer true. A backup that doesn’t explicitly protect against it isn’t just incomplete; it’s actually misleading. The conversation is shifting, and rightly so. It’s no longer just about the 3-2-1 rule. It’s about 3-2-1 with immutability as a baseline. This level of protection shouldn’t feel like a premium add-on. It should be the default. Built in, not bolted on. Because resilience shouldn’t depend on how many security experts you have, or how well you configured the system. It should be inherent. When customers invest in a backup solution, they’re not just buying storage. They’re buying certainty – that when something goes wrong, recovery is guaranteed, and their data is truly protected. Preserving a digital legacy isn’t just about keeping data. It’s about ensuring it remains available, trustworthy, and recoverable no matter what.”

Dawn-Marie Vaughan, DXC Technology

“In 2026, ransomware has fundamentally re-indexed the value of a backup. What was once a simple insurance policy against hardware failure or accidental deletion is now the critical last line of defense in a high-stakes cyberwar.

Many organizations still fall into the trap of assuming that simply ‘having’ a backup is enough. But in today’s hybrid, distributed environments—stretching from on-premises stacks to diverse cloud platforms—a backup that isn’t isolated by design and regularly pressure-tested is essentially a liability. If it isn’t recoverable at the speed the business requires, it might as well not exist.

At DXC, we believe true cyber resilience is no longer an operational ‘add-on’ task. It must be built into the very architecture of modern infrastructure. This means shifting the focus from ‘storage’ to ‘recovery velocity’—protecting immutable points, isolating recovery environments, and ensuring that when (not if) an attack occurs, the path back to ‘green’ is already paved.

As we mark World Backup Day, the most important question for any leader is no longer ‘Are we backed up?’ but rather: ‘If our critical systems vanished tomorrow, how many hours until we are back in business?’

Jack Cherkas, Syntax

“World Backup Day is a reminder that protection must now extend beyond fire, fools, and floods. Data is the currency of today’s digital economy — the lifeblood of intelligent enterprises. The continuing boom in Generative AI amplifies both the power and the risk of data, making backups essential to preserving not just systems, but insight and trust. In an era of automated systems, the ability to restore and validate data is what keeps intelligence resilient when disruption strikes.

For World Backup Day, organizations should ensure they maintain multiple backup copies of critical data using different formats, the proven “3‑2‑1” approach, and, most importantly, know when and how to recover both the data and the underlying business services. For individuals, the day serves as a reminder to protect important files such as family photographs in a secure and accessible place. Resilience starts with readiness, for both enterprises and people alike.”

And speaking of a forward-leaning look at the current backup and storage landscape in the age of agentic AI, consult Solutions Review‘s recent Spotlight session with Everpure: