Most organizations today have adopted what is known as the 3-2-1 backup strategy. A part of that strategy includes managing offsite backup copies. Maintaining offsite backup copies isn’t a new concept, but has it changed and are new market dynamics, policies, or laws forcing organizations to take a closer look at ensuring they have offsite backup copies to safeguard their data? Why do organizations need offsite backup copies?
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)
The most obvious reason is that remote copies ensure that in the event of a local system failure, data corruption, or site-level disaster, a secondary source of information is readily available.
- Ransomware and Cybersecurity Protection
With more cyberattacks targeting primary application systems, encryption and remote immutable copies act as a secure layer of defense. By encrypting and isolating data in a different physical, logical, and unchangeable environment, organizations can securely protect their data from today’s new normal of ransomware attacks.
- Regulatory Compliance and Data Governance
The most significant change for offsite backup copies is that many industries, including healthcare, finance, and government, require secure offsite copies for auditability and compliance. Remote copies provide verifiable evidence of data integrity, retention, and availability. Some of today’s compliance demands include:
- DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act)
- PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)
- HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
- SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act)
- Cybersecurity insurance
- Operational Efficiency
Remote copies enable more than just recovery. They can be leveraged for testing, development, and analytics without impacting production workloads. This creates a dual value proposition—protection and productivity—from the same data investments.
Regulatory compliance demands will continue to change, as well as advancements in security to ensure your data is protected. Best practices for remote copies include some key steps in ensuring optimized data protection practices for remote copies. Read more here!
