A business’ data needs to be considered a priority, which means that its protection should be prioritized accordingly. One facet of doing so is maintaining a backup with a strategy in compliance to best practices. To accomplish this, your backup should feature something that isn’t often considered a benefit: redundancy.
How Redundancy Can Be Good
We know, we know… to a business, “redundancy” is practically a curse, associated with waste and inefficiency. Your backup presents a situation to serve as the exception to this rule.
For instance, having too many supplies on hand is a bad kind of redundancy. It implies you have overspent on that resource and it is now taking up too much of your finite storage space that could otherwise be used for other things. This obviously isn’t good.
In the case of your data backup, on the other hand, redundancy can make it even less likely that your data will be lost.
What Redundancy Looks Like in a Data Backup
To be considered properly redundant, all a backup needs is its own backup. The idea is that, should something happen to one of them, the other (or others) is (or are) available to you.
Let’s examine a few scenarios using different backup methodologies to compare the relative benefits and risks of each.
Here, the data backup options are as follows:
- No backup.
- An onsite data backup.
- A cloud-hosted data backup.
- A backup stored both onsite and in the cloud.
With these options in mind, let’s introduce a circumstance that frequently results in considerable data loss: a ransomware attack encrypting some or all your data.
Without a backup, your business is helpless. With many ransomware samples, encrypted data is about as good as deleted data… and shelling over enough cash to pay the ransom offers no guarantee that your access will be restored.
With an exclusively on-site backup solution, you run the risk of your backup also being encrypted in the attack. As a result, you could potentially find yourself in the same position you would be in with no backup whatsoever.
A cloud-hosted backup is a significantly better option, as all encrypted data can simply be deleted and replicated from your offsite storage… but the best option is the strategy that includes backing up your data both on- and offsite. This gives you the security of a copy of your data remaining isolated from your business along with the convenience of an easily accessed backup for minor in-house mishaps.
You also want to be sure that your cloud provider is also storing your data in multiple locations just in case something happens to the infrastructure storing your backup.
Redundancy Can Be Accomplished with the 3-2-1 Rule
We frequently recommend that all businesses make sure their backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 Rule to make sure that this kind of redundancy is in place. By maintaining at least three copies of their data, in two different kinds of storage media, one of which being maintained offsite (preferably the cloud due to its easy accessibility), a business can practically ensure its access to its essential data.
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