World Backup Day: why smarter data — not more data — defines resilience

As organisations mark World Backup Day, the focus is evolving. Backup is essential, but it works best when guided by clear retention policies and strong data governance. Without those guardrails, resilience programs can expand unchecked, becoming costly to run, difficult to manage, and increasingly hard to defend from a business perspective.

According to International Data Corporation, global data volumes are projected to reach 393.9 zettabytes by 2028 — and Australia is no exception. The country’s data centre market has grown 40-fold over the past two decades, with continued double-digit growth driven by cloud adoption, AI initiatives and increasingly digital services. Meanwhile, cyberthreats continue to escalate, with the Australian Cyber Security Centre reporting tens of thousands of incidents each year.

This convergence is turning resilience into an economic issue. Every additional dataset retained and protected compounds costs across storage, backup operations, compliance, and increasingly, AI systems. As organisations race to operationalise AI, poor data decisions don’t just inflate infrastructure bills — they directly impact the quality and trustworthiness of AI outcomes.

Too often, backup strategies still operate on a ‘just in case’ mindset. Data is copied and retained indefinitely, with little visibility into its actual value. The result is sprawling backup environments that are expensive to maintain and difficult to recover from when disruption hits. Research from Splunk suggests that up to 55% of global enterprise data is ‘dark’, with many Australian organisations reporting that half or more of their data remains unknown, or unused, yet still routinely backed up — driving unnecessary cost and complexity.

This is where governance becomes critical. Effective resilience starts with understanding the data estate: what data exists, how it is used and what level of protection it truly requires. Not all data is equal and treating it that way leads to inefficiency. By classifying data based on business impact — whether that’s regulatory exposure, operational dependency or customer commitments — organisations can tier protection accordingly. Critical systems receive high levels of resilience, while lower-value data can be retained for shorter periods or protected more cost-effectively.

For Australian organisations, this is particularly important in regulated sectors such as financial services, health care and government, where compliance obligations are high and the cost of disruption is significant. But governance is not just about risk mitigation — it also enables better AI. Poorly governed data often flows into analytics pipelines and machine learning models, introducing noise and reducing the reliability of insights. In effect, organisations pay twice: once to store and protect low-value data, and again to fix its downstream impact.

Resilience strategies must also be proven, not assumed. Regular recovery testing ensures backup environments align with real business priorities, surfacing gaps and strengthening governance over time.

As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become the norm, controlling data sprawl is key. Unchecked replication across platforms increases the volume of data that must be secured and backed up, driving up costs and complicating recovery. Consistent governance across environments — on-premises and in the cloud — helps reduce duplication, improve visibility and maintain control.

World Backup Day should serve as a reset. True resilience is not about creating more copies of everything: it is about making deliberate, governed decisions about what data to keep, protect and prioritise.

Because in the age of AI, the organisations that win won’t be the ones with the most data — they’ll be the ones with the right data, managed the right way.

Image credit: iStock.com/Alexander Sikov