How Veeam Cloud Connect Helps With the 3-2-1 Backup Rule
June 1st, 2021 by Kris Price
The 3-2-1 backup rule is a celebrated backup strategy which stands for:
- 3 copies of your data
- On 2 different media types
- With at least 1 copy off site
Three copies of your data
You should have three copies of your data spread across different underlying storages.
If you have two copies of the data on the same storage device, and the hardware fails, then neither backup is going to work. Always be mindful of the storage that your backups are sent to, so you don’t have a single point of failure. Ask yourself “If this hardware dies, are there still two copies of my data somewhere else?”
Two different media types
Your backups need to be on at least two different media types such as tapes, hard drives, or the cloud. Two devices of the same type have a much greater risk of failing around the same time than two devices of different types or two different storage media.
Spreading the data across different mediums also makes it much harder for ransomware to infect every backup. Different mediums also provide different forms of credentials that may not all be tied into the domain.
One copy off site
The last and perhaps most often overlooked rule is keeping one copy off site. This prevents a local disaster such as a flood or fire from damaging all the copies of data.
You could do this by storing a backup in another office, shipping tapes off to a storage facility, or by having a copy in the cloud. There’s good news here for Veeam customers, because Veeam Cloud Connect makes this incredibly easy.
Veeam Cloud Connect
Veeam Cloud Connect makes it easy to get backups and replicas off site to a Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider such as BrightCloud, without the cost and complexity of managing a second infrastructure.
It’s as easy as selecting a service provider and pointing backup or replica jobs to the cloud with a few simple clicks. There’s no separate console, and data is fully encrypted at every step. Backups are as safe and confidential as they would be in a dedicated off-site repository, so that data of all types is completely protected and easy to recover.
Just make sure that you do some research into the service provider to make sure they meet your compliance requirements before signing a contract.
Veeam Cloud Connect with BrightCloud
BrightCloud’s Backup as a Service (BaaS) allows a copy of the backups to be sent to another location that is managed and operated by us in our resilient Datacentres. Having a service like this can be a great solution for customers who do not have a secondary business location to offload their backups to, or want a managed service for their backup and/or disaster recovery plans.
Taking the 3-2-1 rule further
If you want to take the rule a step further, you can adopt the 3-2-1-0 rule. The added 0 means there should be zero errors when testing your backup’s recovery. If you are not properly testing that your backups contain the data you desire and can actually be restored, you have a real business risk.
