Small business technologies are evolving at a break-neck pace and with them, critical business data is being generated and stored in more places than ever. As a result, the backup strategies of yesteryear may not be adequate for for daily operations today.
With World Backup Day landing on March 31st, now is the time to review your data environment and look for gaps with new tools. Today, we're looking at some of the trends that are emerging in backup tech in 2025.
New technologies, more efficient backups
AI and Machine Learning
AI and Machine Learning (ML) have been integrated into more and more software products and backup systems are no exception. Systems on the bleeding edge are now monitoring data within the backup for signs of malware or ransomware. Predictive analytics can also catch signs of failure earlier than ever to help prevent needing to resort to needing to restore in the first place. By analyzing historical data, these systems can predict when a failure might occur and automatically initiate a recovery process before the failure actually hits.
Optimized Scheduling
Scheduling backups is always a delicate balancing act between backup regularity and avoiding slowdowns and interruptions while the backup is executing. Fortunately, smart scheduling now alleviates this issue by intelligently analyzing usage patterns and tailoring backup schedules to get the best of both worlds.
Tampering Detections
In addition to the predictive failure monitoring mentioned above, another predictive system is backup tampering. Many ransomware threats today not only work towards encrypting your important data, it also attempts to find and destroy backup systems. Now, modern backup systems are able to catch these attempts and send alerts or even initiate a recovery plan to minimize downtime.
Faster Restorations
One of the biggest issues with full backup restorations is the time it takes to actually complete the restore. While the restore runs, you and your employees are dead in the water. New systems are able to determine what data is used most and restore that first, only focusing on other, less frequently used data later.
Data in more places than ever
As SMBs continue to evolve and modernize, they find themselves using new platforms and tools. This means data may be stored in new or different places than before. Maybe some data has been moved from an old on-prem tool or system to a cloud-based one. Suddenly, the backup system you used to use is no longer protecting your actual data, but nothing at all.
And with the cloud many execs make the mistake thinking since "it's in the cloud" now, you no longer need to worry about backup. This is only half-true. The reality is, a different set of questions need to be asked:
- What type of recovery measures does your cloud vendor have in-place?
- Does the vendor backup cover instances of accidental/malicious data deletion?
- Does the vendor have an SLA or what is their policy in the event of a data breach on their end? on your end?
- Does your vendor's platform support downloading your data or exporting it to another location?
Determining the answers to the above questions is critical to ensure you're able to plan for the potential pitfalls you may run into later down the line.
What is and isn't a backup
Continuing on from the concept above, it's important to address another pitfall we see pop up fairly often: Cloud syncing services are not a backup! IN spite of what Microsoft may tell you, OneDrive is not a proper backup. Neither is Dropbox, iCloud or Google Docs. Yes they do help guard you against hardware failure, however none of these services are truly immutable and, as a result, they're all still vulnerable to attacks such as ransomware and similar.
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't use these services or platforms. They offer a tremendous benefit and we'd be doing a disservice telling you not to use it. That said, we do recommend using a proper cloud-to-cloud backup solution for any files you do keep in these platforms to ensure you're safeguarding them.
So what is a cloud backup? We like to qualify them by the following features:
- Keeps immutable (ie: unchangeable) copies of files/data.
- Allows for setting retention policy for files.
- Contains file versioning (so you can go back to a previous point in time).
Services like Skykick or Datto SaaS Backup allow for these features and more which help keep your cloud-stored files safe.
Conclusion
In 2025, backup systems are more capable than ever before. At the same time, even small businesses are becoming even more complex. As we roll towards another World Backup Day, we highly recommend taking some time and review your current strategy and overlay it on top of your strategic roadmap to find where gaps or redundancies lay. There's no time like the present to do this!