It stands for 3 copies, in at least 2 locations, with 1 copy offsite, 1 copy stored immutably, and tested for zero errors. Backup software vendors are now promoting a new strategy to replace the old 3-2-1 strategy. Overall, in the event of an attack, organizations need to be able to quickly recover their data and reduce disruption to their business operations. The importance of an “air gapped” backup strategy That’s why having two cloud copies is a good investment. If the cloud is offline for some reason, your business will be down until you can get to your backups. In the case of a ransomware attack, you can assume that the local copy will be destroyed so you would be relying on restoring from the cloud. With two separate cloud copies, if one cloud data centre is offline, you can still reach your backups at the second cloud data centre. The availability of a data centre is usually more like 4 nines. While the storage itself may have 11 nines of durability, entire data centres do go offline from time to time due to communications failures. In addition to adding durability, the second cloud copy greatly enhances the availability of backup data. This level of durability makes the old “two different media” requirement obsolete. If there are two copies in two different cloud data centers, the chances of losing data due to equipment failure is essentially zero. That’s why you never hear about cloud storage vendors losing customer data. If you run the math, 11 nines of durability means that if a user gives you one million objects to store, statistically you will lose one object every 659,000 years. The gold standard adopted by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Wasabi, is 11 nines of durability. In general, cloud storage vendors offer much higher data durability than on-premises storage devices. Software, such as RAID, makes disk arrays tolerant of disk failures, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Hard drives have a limited life span and most will eventually die. If the local backup device fails, you still have the cloud copies. The most common of these is human error – somebody clicks the wrong button and accidentally erases or corrupts the primary data, for example. In addition to ransomware attacks, there are other reasons that companies lose their primary data and are forced to restore from backups. The most common procedure today is to replicate the cloud copy to a second cloud location, preferably one that is at least 500 km away. As for the third copy, people no longer see a need for two different kinds of media. If there is a fire or flood or anything that damages the local backup, you will still have the cloud. And the cloud is always “off-site,” thus satisfying one of the most important requirements of the 3-2-1 backup policy. This immutability is just what you need to keep hackers from destroying your backups. Most cloud storage vendors today offer “immutable” storage, meaning that it is locked and cannot be altered or deleted.
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