Businesses are generating and managing an unprecedented amount of data. And it's not just storing this data securely that's important, but also ensuring its availability when needed. This is where backups play a crucial role.

However, one crucial aspect that's regularly overlooked is the importance of backup location and access. Let's explore why considering physical location, cloud provider, and access control is critical for your backups.

Geographic Separation: When it comes to backups, it's essential to consider geographic separation. Keeping your primary data and backups in different physical locations can help mitigate risks associated with natural disasters, regional power outages, and other location-specific events. By storing backups offsite, businesses can ensure their data remains accessible even if their primary site is compromised.

Diversifying Cloud Providers: For businesses using cloud services, it's common to leverage their primary cloud provider for backups. While this offers convenience, it also poses risks. If your primary data and backups reside with the same cloud provider and that provider experiences a significant outage or cyber attack, both your working data and backups could become corrupted or inaccessible. By utilising different cloud providers for your primary data and backups, you spread the risk and reduce the chances of simultaneous data loss.

Separation of Access Control: Ensuring different access controls for your working data and backups is a vital aspect of data protection. If hackers or ransomware gain access to your primary systems, having separate access controls for your backups could prevent them from compromising both. This approach helps ensure that even if your working data is encrypted by ransomware, your backups remain unaffected, and you can restore operations quickly.

Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: Depending on the industry you operate in, there may be specific regulatory or compliance requirements dictating how and where your data is stored. For instance, some regulations may require data backups to be stored within a particular geographic boundary. To avoid penalties and maintain compliance, it's crucial to factor in these requirements when determining your backup strategy.

Recovery Speed: Lastly, the location and access of your backups can significantly impact recovery times. Backups stored closer to your primary systems may enable faster recovery compared to those stored farther away.

The location and access of your data backups are just as important as the act of backing up and testing your data. It's crucial to consider geographic separation, diversification of cloud providers, separation of access control, compliance requirements, and recovery speeds when formulating your backup strategy. By taking these factors into account, you can ensure your backups are safe, accessible, and ready to be restored when needed.

Do you know where your backups are stored? When was the last time you reviewed access control permissions to it? Not sure where to start? We can help.