Backup Storage Strategies

Minimum Protection

The backup data must be stored so that it is available when required.

The minimal protection for a data set, honed through decades of data storage experience, is encapsulated in the 3-2-1 backup strategy:

• Three copies of the data: The original data and two backups
• Two different storage media types: Magnetic tape, write-once/read-many (WORM) drives, removable disks and cloud are among the most common approaches. The selection of the appropriate media will be affected by the cost of storage, speed of backup and restore, backward compatibility with legacy practices, integrity guarantees and other characteristics of the media type.
• One copy offsite: You cannot provide replication of an infrastructure in the infrastructure you are attempting to protect.

The location where

guarantee it is fully usable at the offsite location. The organization may lose some media is stored is also control of the security governance and a major factor in structuring controls used to store the data. Cost

the organization's

may be lower or higher than the onsite backup strategy. option, depending on the nature of the organization and the options offered by the provider. A provider with the sole focus on secure data storage may be able

The three most common choices are: to scale services such that secure storage

• Onsite: The organization has full control

is much more affordable for its clientele, of, and responsibility for, the stored where the same service would be costdata. The storage media is located in the prohibitive for each individual client. The production facility and is immediately transportation of the data may occur available for recovery from data loss. either through physical transfer of the

Cost may be proportionally higher for backup media, or through a data vaulting the organization, depending on the approach, which relies on data networks organization's core competencies and to transfer the information to storage type of business. (Example: a small or media at the offsite location. midsize organization might not have the data center capacity and skillset internally • Cloud Backup-as-a-Service: A number of cloud service providers offer Backupto support thorough secure backups.)

as-a-Service. This differs from the

• Offsite: The data is transported to

physical locations approaches of onsite and stored in a location sufficiently and offsite, since the data is replicated distant and robust that it would not be multiple times inside the CSP's impacted by the catastrophic failure environment and would be available as of the production facility. The data is needed. Typically, these services offer exposed to additional risk in transit both on-line and near-line services, with and may require additional controls to different costs and availabilities.