Think you had a bad Monday? Imagine if our 24×7 monitoring picked up that a client’s site went off-line late on a Sunday night, and when the client rolled into the office early Monday morning following our notification, they found a water leak in their server room had drowned their server, as well as their local backup copy.
Fortunately, if this client had off-site data replication to our cloud-based target, we could work to procure replacement (and dry) hardware, trigger a download of their server image, and begin the data restoration before so that the client could be back online before the floor is completely dry.
In addition to protection against physical risks such as fire or flood, an added benefit of having an off-site component of your data backup strategy is that it creates an “air gap” to your data protecting against technical risks, such as malware and ransomware.
According to Techopedia, “Air gapping is a security measure that physically or logically isolates at least one copy of a data backup. The purpose of air gapping is to keep malicious entities away from the last copy of an organization’s digital assets… Air gap backups serve two primary purposes. First, they prevent at least one copy of a backup from being manipulated or destroyed. Second, they help ensure quick restores because the integrity of an isolated, air-gapped backup can be trusted.”
As a result, Sourcepass recommends all clients leverage off-site backups as part of their data protection strategy.
Jenna Ar-Bab is the Vice President of Client Experience