One Data Backup Location Is No Longer Enough in an Increasingly Dangerous World

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Data centers are increasingly becoming targets of military strikes and large-scale cyberattacks by nation-states and criminal organizations alike.

Ukraine has reportedly attacked Russian data centers, while Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s power grid and communications infrastructure. Iranian strikes have also damaged cloud data centers in the Middle East. But military attacks aren’t the only danger. In 2023, ransomware criminals attacked Danish cloud provider CloudNordic, encrypting both its production systems and backups. Most customers reportedly lost all the data they had stored with the company.

These incidents highlight an uncomfortable reality: your data can be lost through physical destruction or cyberattacks, even when it’s stored with a professional cloud provider. For businesses in New York, the danger may seem distant. But the lesson applies everywhere. No single building, data center, cloud provider, or backup environment should be considered indestructible.

The Cloud Is Still a Physical Place

We often talk about “the cloud” as if our information exists somewhere in a protected digital universe. In reality, cloud data lives on physical servers in buildings that depend on electricity, cooling systems, and telecommunications networks. Those facilities can be affected by fires, floods, power outages, cyberattacks, or physical destruction.

Cloud computing remains an excellent way to store and protect business information. Major providers invest heavily in redundancy and disaster recovery. But even their infrastructure has limits.

When cloud facilities in the Middle East were damaged by military strikes, some customers experienced disruptions despite the providers’ sophisticated infrastructure. If your cloud providers cannot guarantee uninterrupted access to their facilities, neither can your business.

Why One Cloud Backup Location Isn’t Always Enough

Businesses sometimes believe they are protected because they have multiple backups. But where those backups are stored matters just as much as how many exist.

For critical business information, we recommend maintaining backups in at least two geographically separate cloud locations, preferably with independent providers, so that a failure or compromise affecting one does not automatically affect the other.

This doesn’t mean asking employees to take backup drives home. It means using professionally managed, geographically distributed backup storage with appropriate security, encryption, and monitoring.

For additional protection against ransomware, backups should also be isolated or immutable, meaning they cannot easily be modified or deleted by an attacker.

Why Local Backups Still Matter

With all the advantages of cloud backup, it’s easy to overlook the value of keeping a backup on your own premises.

Imagine that your cloud backup provider suffers a serious cyberattack or its data center becomes unavailable. Meanwhile, an employee accidentally deletes an important file, or your office server fails.

If your only backups are in the affected cloud environment, you may have no way to restore that information until the provider recovers.

A local backup gives you another recovery option that doesn’t depend on the cloud being available.

Speed is another important advantage. Restoring several terabytes of data from the cloud could take days, depending on your Internet connection. Restoring the same information from a local backup appliance may take hours.

Local backups are particularly valuable for servers, databases, and large volumes of business data where recovery time matters.

Of course, local backups alone aren’t sufficient either. A fire, flood, theft, or major electrical event could destroy both your production systems and the backup sitting nearby.

Local and cloud backups complement each other. Neither should be your only line of defense.

Backups Are Only Half the Solution

Having your data stored safely somewhere else is essential. But what happens after a disaster?

If your office server is destroyed, where will you restore the data? How long will it take? Can your employees continue working while the original infrastructure is unavailable? A good disaster recovery plan addresses those questions before something goes wrong. It should also cover information stored in Microsoft 365, SharePoint, OneDrive, accounting applications, and other cloud services.

And remember: a successful backup is not proof of a successful recovery. Backups need to be monitored and periodically tested.

How CDML Can Help

CDML helps organizations develop practical backup and disaster recovery strategies using a combination of local storage, geographically separate cloud backups, Microsoft 365 protection, monitoring, and recovery testing.

We focus on more than saving copies of files. We help organizations plan how to restore critical systems and resume operations when something goes wrong.

Final Thoughts

Modern warfare is providing a dramatic reminder of an important IT principle: never depend on a single location to protect your critical information.

You may never experience a military attack on your infrastructure. But fires, floods, ransomware, hardware failures, and cloud outages can produce similarly devastating results.

The question isn’t simply whether you have backups, but whether your business could recover if an entire backup location disappeared tomorrow. If you’re unsure of the answer, contact CDML Computer Services to review your backup and disaster recovery strategy.

Stay safe. Stay informed. Stay compliant.

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