The New Golden Rule of Backup: 3-2-1-1-0

A good solution for backing up data has the advantage of being relatively left alone to do its thing once it’s in place. However, over time, it may no longer achieve the desired outcome to meet the organisation’s ever-changing needs. In addition, it may not be taking advantage of the improvements in backup technologies or aligning with the golden rule of backup, which emphasises resilience, redundancy, and off-site protection.

Testing your backups on a regular basis is absolutely key, but it is also essential to ensure that your backup solution follows the 3-2-1 Golden Rule:

• 3 x Copies of data
  • So, that’s two further copies in addition to your primary data
• 2 x Different media types
  • For example, an internal hard drive and a removable storage device
• 1 x Copy off-site
  • Ensuring data is also moved to an alternative secure physical location

But we now have to question whether this is still THE ‘Golden Rule’? There is no question that this is the minimum for a backup solution, and may be sufficient to save your business from incidents like:

• Environmental (fire, flood etc)
• User error (file deletion)
• Internal malicious attack (disgruntled employee)
• IT error (equipment failure)

But, the world has changed, cybercrime has evolved, and now extra resiliency is needed to ensure your data is truly secure and you have the ability to recover it, if a major cyberattack occurs.

The New Golden Rule of Backup

Nowadays, due to the additional threats and their increased maliciousness, it is strongly recommended that you must add two further steps, so it becomes:

As before:

• 3 – Copies of data
• 2 – Different media types
• 1 – Copy off-site

Plus, in addition

• 1 x Air-gapped and immutable copy
  • This has no network connection to your IT infrastructure, and can be a ‘write-once read-many’ state; making your data inerasable and unmodifiable (immutable), but still recoverable
• 0 x Errors in the backups
  • Verifying your data on a daily basis to ensure the backups were successful, and undertaking regular rehearsals to ensure the data can be recovered.

Therefore, ‘3-2-1-1-0’ has become the NEW ‘Golden Rule’! This will help you mitigate against the risk of your organisation experiencing any unforeseen downtime because, with this, you should have the right solution in place to ensure a fast and secure recovery.

If you need to discuss this subject any further, then please talk to us, the experts. CiContinuity’s managed Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions, together with our 25-years’ worth of expertise, will ensure that your data is safe.

Get in touch today to speak with one of our Business Continuity Sales Specialists: