3-2-1 Backup Strategy

Daily Backups are bread and butter of any organisation’s IT department. An organisation can lose its data due to many reasons: cyber-attacks, corrupt storage media, rogue employees or human error.  Yet many companies fail to formulate a backup and recovery plan for their data. One simple yet effective strategy is the 3-2-1 backup strategy:  

321 backup strategy Privasec

The 3-2-1 strategy consists of three steps:

• STEP 1: Create three copies of your data including one primary copy and two other backup copies.
• STEP 2: Store the two backup copies on two different media such as hard disks or cloud.
• STEP 3: Always keep one of these copies at an offsite location. 

The strategy can be better understood by a simple example. Damian has stored a photo of his family (family.jpg) on his personal computer. This is the first copy of the image. Damian is smart enough to have a backup of this precious family photo on his external hard drive and another copy on Google Cloud. That constitutes two backup copies of the image in two different medium: hard disk (onsite) and cloud (offsite).  

Having an onsite copy is good for immediate retrieval of data but keeping an offsite copy is a key component is the 3-2-1 backup strategy. An onsite copy is susceptible to loss of data. 

Privasec RED are leaders in Penetration Testing, Red Team Attack simulations, SCADA & ICS Security, Physical Intrusions, Theft simulations, Open Source Intelligence Gathering (OSINT), Social Engineering, and Phishing. Learn more about our Privasec Red Services here

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