Protecting valuable information has never been more critical. From businesses managing sensitive customer data to individuals safeguarding personal files, backups are an essential part of any data security strategy. But as cyber threats evolve, so must our backup solutions. One of the most powerful tools in ensuring data integrity is the use of immutable backups. Coupled with the practice of storing backups in different cloud locations, immutable backups offer an added layer of protection, ensuring that your data is secure from both accidental and malicious loss.
What Are Immutable Backups?
An immutable backup is a backup that cannot be altered, deleted, or overwritten for a specified period. This is achieved through specialized configurations in cloud services or through certain backup software solutions that enforce write-once-read-many (WORM) policies. Once data is stored as immutable, it remains in its original form, ensuring that no one — not even an administrator or a hacker — can change or erase it.
This capability is particularly valuable in the face of growing ransomware attacks and insider threats, both of which are capable of corrupting or deleting data. With immutable backups, even if your primary data is compromised, you have a reliable and tamper-proof recovery point from which to restore your systems.
Why Immutable Backups Are Vital
- Protection Against Ransomware: One of the biggest threats to data today is ransomware, where attackers encrypt your data and demand a ransom for the decryption key. If your backups are immutable, ransomware cannot delete or encrypt them, providing a lifeline to restore your systems without succumbing to the demands of cybercriminals.
- Data Integrity and Reliability: Immutable backups guarantee that the data remains unchanged. This ensures that what you backed up is exactly what you can restore. For businesses, this is critical for legal compliance and maintaining the trust of stakeholders, knowing that their information is securely stored.
- No Accidental Deletion: Human error is a common cause of data loss. With immutable backups, even if someone accidentally deletes or modifies a backup, the immutable setting prevents any changes. This minimizes the risk of critical data being lost due to mistakes.
- Protection Against Insider Threats: Not all threats come from external sources. Insider threats — employees or contractors with malicious intentions or who make errors — can be just as damaging. Immutable backups eliminate this risk by making it impossible for unauthorized users to alter or delete the backup data.
Why Storing Backups in Different Cloud Locations Is a Smart Strategy
While immutable backups provide one form of protection, another key to data security is diversification. Storing your backups in multiple cloud locations — ideally across different providers or geographical regions — is crucial for ensuring that your data is not vulnerable to localized threats, service outages, or disasters.
Here are a few reasons why diversifying your cloud backup locations is so important:
- Disaster Recovery: Natural disasters, power outages, or regional service disruptions can affect one data center or cloud provider’s availability. By spreading your backups across different cloud locations, you minimize the risk of losing access to your backups if one location goes down.
- Avoiding Single Points of Failure: Relying on a single cloud provider for your backup storage introduces a single point of failure. If that provider experiences a breach, technical failure, or goes offline, you could be left without access to your data. By diversifying backup locations, you ensure that your data is still accessible if one provider faces issues.
- Geographical Redundancy: Different regions have varying levels of data protection laws, and having backups in multiple locations ensures that your data complies with regional data regulations (such as GDPR in Europe or CCPA in California). Additionally, storing backups across different geographical locations minimizes the risk that a regional cyberattack will impact all your data simultaneously.
- Performance Optimization: Having backups stored in multiple regions can also optimize recovery times. If your main business operations are based in a certain location, having a backup in the nearest cloud data center can speed up the recovery process, minimizing downtime in the event of an incident.
How 101 Data Solutions Partners with Wasabi Cloud to Enhance Backup Security
To help businesses implement this highly effective strategy of immutable and geographically diverse backups, 101 Data Solutions partners with Wasabi Cloud. Wasabi has earned a reputation for offering high-performance cloud storage solutions that are both cost-effective and reliable. What makes this partnership even more valuable is Wasabi’s recent expansion with two data centers now in the UK. In a significant move to strengthen its global infrastructure and provide even more robust services to its European clients, Wasabi Technologies has officially opened its second data centre in the United Kingdom. Located in Chessington, UK, the new facility, named EU-West-3, marks a key milestone in Wasabi’s commitment to delivering fast, secure, and cost-effective cloud storage solutions across Europe.
Launched in October 2024, the Chessington data centre is designed to meet the growing demand for cloud storage in the region, offering customers enhanced reliability, faster access to data, and improved compliance with local data sovereignty regulations.
By leveraging Wasabi’s infrastructure, businesses can now benefit from multiple cloud locations within the UK, ensuring that they have backup solutions that are geographically diversified within the region. This makes it easier for companies to comply with local data protection regulations like the GDPR while ensuring quick access to backup data when needed.
The Benefits of Using Wasabi Cloud for Immutable Backups
- Geographical Redundancy: Wasabi’s two UK data centers ensure that you can store your immutable backups in separate locations, further reducing the risk of data loss from localized incidents like natural disasters or regional network outages.
- Cost-Effective Storage: Wasabi’s cloud storage is known for its affordability compared to other cloud providers, offering high-value storage solutions with no hidden fees. This makes it a great option for businesses that need to store large volumes of backup data securely without breaking the bank.
- High Performance and Speed: With Wasabi’s fast, reliable storage infrastructure, businesses can expect quick backup and recovery times, which can significantly reduce downtime during a disaster recovery event.
- Immutability Features: Wasabi offers immutable storage features to help prevent unauthorized modification or deletion of your backup data. By utilizing this feature, businesses can ensure their backups are safe from cyberattacks, accidental deletion, and malicious tampering.
Best Practices for Implementing Immutable and Distributed Backups
- Automate Backup Schedules: To ensure that your data is always backed up regularly, automate the process. Many cloud backup services allow you to set up automated schedules that will back up data at regular intervals, ensuring you always have a recent version of your files.
- Use Multiple Providers: Consider using multiple cloud backup services from different providers. This ensures that if one service goes down, you still have access to your backup from another provider. Additionally, each cloud provider has different strengths, such as different encryption methods or compliance standards, so using a variety of services may give you better overall security.
- Test Your Backups Regularly: It’s not enough to just have backups in place. You should periodically test your backups to make sure they are recoverable. This helps you catch any potential issues with your backup process and ensures that when you need to recover data, it’s available and intact.
- Implement Layered Security: While immutable backups protect against tampering, it’s also essential to employ additional layers of security, such as strong encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA), for your cloud backup accounts. This adds further protection against unauthorized access to your backup data.
Conclusion
In the age of cyber threats, having reliable, secure backups is essential to ensuring data protection. Immutable backups in the cloud offer robust protection against accidental loss, cyberattacks, and insider threats, while storing those backups in multiple locations enhances security through geographical redundancy. By leveraging both immutable backups and diversified cloud storage locations, individuals and businesses can rest assured that their data is protected and recoverable, no matter what challenges may arise.
With 101 Data Solutions partnering with Wasabi Cloud, businesses now have access to an enhanced cloud backup strategy, supported by two UK-based data centers, ensuring compliance, performance, and security. Adopting these strategies is no longer a luxury but a necessity in our increasingly digital and interconnected world.
