The 3-2-1 Rule needs a refresh this World Backup Day

Businesses today face a wide range of uncertainties, from pandemic to cyberattacks to natural disasters. Because of their increased reliance on technology, businesses are becoming more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, losing data, and experiencing business disruptions. Running a business with constant disruptions and frequent downtime can have a far greater impact on a company's overall success than monetary losses.

Businesses nowadays are more concerned with their market reputation, brand image, customer loyalty, and a variety of other factors; however, businesses affected by downtime frequently report challenges such as customer loss, damaged brand image, and lower employee productivity.

To avoid such damage, businesses must go above and beyond to ensure they have a solid data backup strategy in place, as well as a strong Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan that mitigates business risks and minimizes downtime. 

World Backup Day 2023, is a great opportunity to take a more pragmatic approach to the best practices advice given to the market to minimize and protect valuable data – and turn into the growing statistics. We challenge to look at it as a numbers game. Here are few numbers to take in – with a new 2023 look – and motivate everyone to do the best with their backups.

Let’s start with the 3-2-1 Rule. This isn’t new or broken, but needs a refresh given the current state of cyberthreats and ransomware attacks. The 3-2-1 Rule is a great data management principle that states there should be 3 (or more) copies of data on 2 (or more) different media, with at least 1 of those being off-site. This is great as it doesn’t prescribe any particular hardware technology and with the rest of my advice is ready for nearly every failure scenario.  

Object storage has been designed for at least 99.999999999% annual durability. Let’s do the math. If 99% reliability means that you will lose one object out of 100 every year, then 99.999% (5 nines) reliability means that you will lose one object out of 100,000 objects every year, and that should be very appealing to many in the market today. Cloud and object storage is not new, but it has clearly proven scale, durability and availability in the market. It’s now time that object storage takes a serious stake in the 3-2-1 Rule as well. 

Bottomline is, we need to build on the capabilities in the market yet accept the realities of the threats today. Ransomware is the disaster that, by the numbers, is much more likely to hit than a fire, flood and blood type of scenario. Let’s leverage one of the more resilient storage types, object storage, and leverage one of the more unique aspects of its value: immutability.  

Companies should also double-down on the 3-2-1 Rule with the two non-production copies of backup data on immutable targets, quite possibly both of them being object storage. Imagine a 3-2-1 rule implementation where both separate copies were immutable object storage. How resilient is that!?  

You may wonder, how do we address the logical requirement of one copy off-site? We could go to the cloud from on-premises (inherently off-site); we could use different cloud regions (definitely off-site) from the two copies; we could use different availability zones and cloud subscriptions (logically off-site and abstracted). The cloud and object storage world bring so much more to the equation for designing resilient 3-2-1 Rule designs that there is no reason we can’t have a highly resilient backup infrastructure that provides a high likelihood of being able to recover data in a ransomware incident. 

Sandeep Bhambure

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The article has been co-authored by Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam.