Why offsite backup is essential today?

Why is online offsite backup essential today? Whether you’re an IT professional looking to enhance your organization’s data security or simply curious about the topic, this article is for you. We’ll dive into the benefits, features, and key considerations of cloud backup solutions. These online systems now support advanced features such as automated backups, remote access, and validation and verification to ensure backup reliability.

We’ll also spotlight Leviia Storag3, our 100% French S3 offering that stands out in the market: fully developed in France, sovereign, highly secure, and priced competitively with predictable costs. Our solution is compatible with all major backup software, such as Veeam, Acronis, Rubrik, and more.

1. What is online offsite backup?

Online offsite backup involves transferring data to an external location via the internet. Unlike traditional tape backup or disk backup methods that rely on onsite physical devices, this approach stores data in remote data centers managed by a service provider. Offsite backup is increasingly favored by businesses and organizations of all sizes because it offers a more secure and cost-effective alternative to physical backups. It also supports hybrid backup solutions such as disk-to-disk-to-tape and cloud-to-cloud backup, depending on infrastructure needs.

2. Benefits of online offsite backup

Greater Scalability

Scalability is a key advantage of offsite backup. It allows businesses to adjust storage capacity based on evolving needs, ensuring efficient and cost-effective data lifecycle management without the limitations of physical storage. Advanced systems now support data compression and cost management features to optimize usage.

Enhanced Security

Data centers hosting offsite backups provide superior security compared to what most businesses can achieve. This ensures optimal protection against physical threats and cyberattacks. Some leverage air-gap security techniques, cybersecurity measures, and data integrity protocols to provide an additional line of defense against ransomware and unauthorized access.

Simplified Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC)

Offsite backup simplifies the implementation of a disaster recovery plan and business continuity strategy. Storing data offsite in secure, accessible conditions enables fast and efficient data recovery during a disaster, minimizing downtime and operational or financial impacts. Service-level agreements often guarantee specific recovery times and performance thresholds. Offsite backups also align with enterprise-level data vaulting strategies, where critical information is stored in highly secured and geographically isolated locations.

Lower Costs

Maintaining and replacing physical storage devices can become costly over time. Offsite backup transforms these internal costs (for purchasing, maintaining, and securing equipment) into predictable service fees, which are generally easier to manage. The reduction of data transfer costs and streamlined data transmission also contribute to better cost management across the board.

Fewer Human Resources

Physical backups require significant human resources, whereas automated backups and managed offsite backup systems free up these resources. Modern solutions also support endpoint backups to protect data across all devices with minimal IT intervention. These systems typically operate as remote backup solutions that minimize onsite infrastructure needs.

Accessibility

Unlike physical media, offsite backup data is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. This enhances data accessibility, flexibility, and responsiveness in unforeseen situations. Remote access protocols and encrypted data transmission channels ensure secure availability regardless of user location.

3. Combining offsite and physical backups (3-2-1 Strategy)

Implementing a robust and effective backup strategy is critical for ensuring the security and availability of your critical data. Combining offsite and physical backups provides an additional layer of protection.

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule

• 3 copies of each critical dataset (including the original).
• 2 different types of storage media (e.g., local hard drive and cloud storage).
• 1 copy stored offsite, ideally in a cloud environment.

The Advanced 3-2-1-1-0 Strategy

For even greater resilience, some add two additional components:

• 1 immutable backup or air-gapped copy to protect against accidental or malicious changes, including ransomware attacks.
• 0 recovery errors, achieved through regular recovery testing and data retrieval procedures to ensure backups are reliable and accessible.

Importance for DR and BC

A robust backup strategy is vital for effective DR and BC planning. The ability to quickly recover data after an incident minimizes downtime and operational disruptions. Offsite backups, stored geographically separate from the organization’s premises, provide added assurance, allowing data recovery even if physical locations are inaccessible or destroyed.

4. Object storage: the best solution for offsite backups

The S3 protocol has become the go-to solution for offsite backups due to its dynamic scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing, and advanced security and durability features.

Developed in the 1990s to address the limitations of traditional storage technologies (like block or file storage), object storage was popularized by Amazon. Later, Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage expanded the ecosystem, while new players like Leviia in France and Wasabi have introduced innovative, cost-effective backup storage solutions.

Key Benefits of Object Storage

• Cost vs. Efficiency: Object storage offers the best cost-to-efficiency ratio. Its distributed architecture enables massive data storage using affordable hard drives, simplified management, reduced operational costs, and consumption, based pricing. At Leviia, our S3 solution comes with a transparent, flat-rate pricing structure, up to four times cheaper than competitors.
• Enhanced Security: Object storage supports advanced cybersecurity measures, including server-side and client-side encryption, versioning to retain previous data versions, immutable backup to prevent accidental or malicious changes, and access controls to restrict data access. Leviia’s S3 solution includes geo-replicated data, encryption in transit and at rest, anti-DDoS protection, air-gap security techniques, and ISO 27001 & HDS certifications for healthcare data.
• Scalability: Unlike other storage technologies that require costly server upgrades, object storage scales seamlessly to meet growing data needs.
• High Availability: Advanced solutions like Leviia’s ensure data availability (99.999999999% uptime) by replicating data across multiple remote data centers. This level of data redundancy ensures information remains accessible even during simultaneous hardware failures. This is part of a high-availability architecture essential for critical infrastructure.
• Ease of Use: Object storage is user-friendly, with intuitive management interfaces that allow businesses to manage backups autonomously without specialized IT staff. Modern APIs also support integration with data exchange protocols and other IT services.

5. Immutability and versioning compared to physical backups

Immutability and versioning are two key reasons why offsite backup is essential today.

Immutability ensures that backed-up data cannot be modified or deleted for a set period, offering significant protection against ransomware compared to physical backups.

Versioning retains multiple versions of a file each time it’s modified and backed up. This provides additional protection against data loss, allowing easy restoration of previous versions in case of accidental or malicious changes a feature often limited or harder to achieve with physical backups.

6. Backup management software

The effectiveness of backup strategies lies in the interoperability between offsite backups and backup software. Trusted solutions like Veeam, Acronis, F-Secure, Atempo, and Rubrik seamlessly integrate with S3 storage, enabling simplified, automated backups, and centralized data protection.

These platforms also allow administrators to configure retention policies for different data types, ensuring long-term compliance and efficient storage.

Types of Backups

• Full Backup: Creates a complete copy of data each time, offering the simplest restoration but requiring significant time and resources.
• Incremental Backup: Backs up only data changed since the last backup (full or incremental), optimizing storage space and backup time.
• Differential Backup: Backs up data changed since the last full backup, balancing restoration speed and storage efficiency.
• Some advanced setups also enable continuous data protection, capturing changes in real time to minimize recovery point objectives (RPO).

Why offsite Backup is essential today? We hope this article has answered why offsite backup is critical for cybersecurity. Object storage, with its flexibility, affordability, and ease of use, is the ideal solution for implementing this strategy effectively. Discover how Leviia can help you build a resilient, GDPR-compliant backup strategy tailored for European businesses. To learn more, contact us.