Digital Off-Site Backup Strategy

This question asks if your vendor sends backup copies to another location over the internet or private networks - like automatically copying your data to a distant data center. Unlike physical off-site backups (DATA-13), these are transferred electronically without moving physical media.

Digital off-site backups provide faster, more frequent protection than physical transportation and enable rapid disaster recovery. They protect against regional disasters, reduce recovery time from hours to minutes, and eliminate risks associated with physical media transport. This capability is crucial for maintaining uptime SLAs and meeting modern business continuity expectations.

Companies often replicate data to another server in the same data center, which doesn't protect against facility-wide disasters. Another mistake is not encrypting data during transmission, exposing it to interception, or not testing whether the off-site backups can actually be restored quickly enough to meet recovery objectives.