Enhancing Data Protection with Remote Storage Solutions

To protect your data, you need to do more than keep multiple copies of critical data—you also need to keep those copies safe from the same risks that could compromise the originals. 

Storing backups outside a primary site helps organizations reduce exposure to localized failures, maintain business continuity, and strengthen disaster recovery readiness. So how does offsite backup work? Why is it essential for resilience planning?  What strategies and technologies can you use to build effective remote storage solutions? To stay resilient in today’s complex threat environment, you must be able to answer all of these questions.

What Is Offsite Backup?

Offsite backup refers to the practice of storing data backups at a physical location separate from the primary data source. For example, an organization might maintain a second company-owned data center, contract with a third-party facility, or house backup copies in the cloud. 

This approach differs from onsite (or local) backups, which typically store copies on local drives, internal servers, or backup media held within the same facility. Onsite backups offer convenience and fast restore times, but they share the same physical and cybersecurity risks as the production systems: a fire, flood, ransomware incident, or hardware failure could wipe out both the primary data and its local backup simultaneously. 

By contrast, offsite backups provide geographic separation that protects organizations from site-specific disruptions. While onsite backup remains an important component of a data protection strategy, offsite backup adds a critical layer of resilience—giving organizations confidence that they can recover even when their primary and local backup systems fail. It's an important component of the 3-2-1 backup rule, which states that you should have three copies of your data on two different media types, with one of those copies stored off site.

Why Offsite Backups Are Critical for Business Resilience

Offsite backup strengthens business resilience by guarding critical data and systems against location-specific threats. The separation of backup from production systems reduces the risk that both are destroyed in the same incident. 

Beyond disaster prevention, offsite backups support broader business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning. They allow organizations to recover operations even when the primary environment is compromised, so that downtime and data loss are minimized. Remote backup storage helps firms respond to unplanned disruptions by giving them access to recovery points that live outside the affected location. 

Regulators and standards bodies increasingly treat offsite backup as a foundational control for information security and data protection. For example, ISO 27001 explicitly requires that “backup copies of information, software and systems should be maintained and regularly tested” and stored in a location that is physically distinct from production. Companies that do not isolate backup data from production can create single points of failure and undermine audit compliance.

Types of Offsite Backup Solutions

Offsite backup solutions come in several forms, each striking a different balance among cost, control, and recovery speed. Some organizations still rely on traditional physical media, while others replicate data to remote facilities or leverage the cloud for scalability and automation. Understanding these options helps businesses choose the right mix for their continuity and compliance goals.

• Physical offsite storage: Organizations may still use physical media—such as tapes, hard drives, or external disks—that are manually transported and stored at a separate location. This approach provides complete physical separation from production systems but is labor-intensive, prone to handling errors, and can delay recovery due to transport and retrieval time.

• Data centers or colocation backup: A more advanced method involves replicating data to a second private or third-party data center. This setup offers greater reliability and control than physical transport, with faster data transfer and retrieval. However, it introduces added infrastructure and maintenance costs, making it best suited for enterprises that need strict oversight of their environments.

• Cloud-based offsite backup: Cloud platforms—whether public, private, or hybrid—have become the dominant option for offsite backup because they offer scalability, automation, and rapid recovery without the need for dedicated hardware. Some organizations manage their cloud backup environments directly, while others adopt Backup as a Service (BaaS), in which a third-party provider like AWS, Azure, or Google handles the replication and management. Cloud-based backups can also protect SaaS applications like Salesforce, helping businesses maintain control over customer data and compliance requirements.

Offsite Backup vs. Cloud Backup: What’s the Difference?

It’s common for people to use the terms offsite backup and cloud backup interchangeably, but they are not identical. As we just saw, all cloud backups are offsite, but not all offsite backups are cloud-based. While physical offsite datacenters are purely storage-oriented, cloud backup services generally provide additional features and management options.

What might lead an enterprise to choose one over the other?

• A remote data center using physical media or replication may provide better performance or regulatory alignment for organizations with minimal internet bandwidth, a need for strict data sovereignty, or very large data sets. The storage can be physically secured and under the organization’s direct control, which appeals to highly regulated sectors.

• If a business needs remote accessibility, global operations, scalable capacity, and simplified management, then cloud backup becomes the more compelling option. It supports distributed locations and teams working from many places, and can offload their infrastructure maintenance. But it also depends heavily on internet availability, bandwidth, and provider reliability.

• A hybrid approach is often optimal. Many organizations adopt a layered model: a local/onsite backup for fast restore, a remote offsite data center or cloud copy for resilience, and possibly a cloud tier for long-term retention. This lets them combine speed, control, scale, and cost efficiency.

Key Benefits of Offsite Backup in Disaster Recovery

In real-world physical or cyber disruptions, offsite backups give organizations a remote copy of data that remains intact even when the primary site is compromised. That means faster recovery and less data loss, which translates into lower cost, reduced reputational damage and stronger business continuity. 

In many scenarios, an organization can only meet its Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) because it has these offsite backups in place. RTOs set a limit on how long operations can remain offline before their impact becomes unacceptable; RPOs define the maximum acceptable interval during which transactional data could be lost from an IT service, which in practice determines how often data is saved to a backup. An organization can back up data frequently and recover it quickly, even in challenging scenarios, thanks to offsite backup.

A robust offsite strategy also underpins broader data protection practices, including full lifecycle management, auditing, and compliance with frameworks like the classic 3-2-1 rule and formalized backup and recovery plans. When organizations commit to offsite backups, they position themselves to recover from widespread incidents rather than just local hardware failures.

Common Challenges and Risks of Offsite Backup

Offsite backup offers substantial resilience benefits, but it also introduces specific challenges and risks that organizations must actively manage. Without clear planning and operational discipline, these risks can undermine the very protections offsite backup is meant to provide. Here are three major areas of concern:

• Network bandwidth limitations during backup or restore: Moving large volumes of data to an offsite location—either via physical transport or over an internet/WAN link—can create bottlenecks. If the upload link is slow or congested, backups may fall behind schedule or heavy network traffic may interfere with normal operations. Inadequate throughput may also extend restore times beyond acceptable thresholds for RTO and RPO. Planning backup windows, using bandwidth throttling, and leveraging techniques like incremental backup are crucial to mitigate this risk.

• Data security during transmission and storage: Offsite backup data sits outside the production zone and is often accessed or transferred over networks, raising concerns about data in transit and at rest. Misconfigured permissions, inadequate encryption or improper isolation can lead to compromised backups or unauthorized access. Organizations need to apply strong encryption, use multi-factor authentication, maintain strict access controls, and regularly monitor for abnormal activity to keep offsite data secure.

• Managing access, cost, and vendor lock-in across multi-cloud or hybrid environments: While cloud-based offsite backup models offer flexibility, they also bring cost complexity—hidden egress fees, unexpected API usage, data retrieval charges, and unplanned storage expansion can all drive up costs. At the same time, heavy reliance on a single cloud vendor can lead to vendor lock-in, making switching providers difficult or costly because of proprietary formats or tight integrations. Organizations should plan escape paths, use standardized formats where feasible, and negotiate contract terms that allow mobility.

None of these risk areas should make you avoid offsite backup. Rather, they underscore the need for good planning, encryption, monitoring, and governance, so organizations can get the resilience benefits without exposing themselves to new failure modes.

Best Practices for Building a Reliable Offsite Backup Strategy

Implementing a reliable offsite backup strategy requires more than simply copying data to a remote location. Organizations must take deliberate action around control of data copies, automation, security, verification, and geographic diversity so that backups remain usable when disaster strikes. Below are best practices that build a strong foundation for an offsite backup system.

• Apply the 3-2-1 backup rule: This classic guideline that we discussed above advises keeping three copies of critical data, storing them on at least two different types of storage media, with one copy located remotely. Following this rule helps avoid a single point of failure and improves recovery reliability.

• Automate backup schedules and versioning: Automating the backup process removes reliance on fallible humans, ensures that backups run consistently, and enables retention of multiple versions of data for retrieval at specific points in time. 

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest: Offsite backup data travels across networks and resides in remote storage, so encryption and strict access controls are essential to protect it from unauthorized access or tampering.

• Run regular restore tests to verify reliability: A backup is only useful if you can restore from it. Scheduling and performing periodic recovery drills validates that data is intact, that restore procedures work, and that your RTO and RPO goals are realistic.

• Diversify storage locations for risk mitigation: Hosting backups in regions or facilities that are physically distant from your primary site helps protect data from regional disasters (natural or man-made). It also supports geographic resilience and compliance demands.

Why Every Business Needs Offsite Backup Today

Offsite backup protects organizations from local disasters, cyberattacks, and human error, and gives them the ability to restore critical data even when their primary environment is compromised. Businesses need to view offsite backups not as an optional extra but as a necessary layer of their data protection and business continuity strategy.

If your organization has not reviewed its backup strategy recently, now is the time to act. Consider whether your current approach includes geographic separation, automated versioning, strong encryption, and regular restore tests. Ask whether your solution supports the speed required for realistic RTOs and RPOs. If any of those pieces are missing, it’s worth integrating or upgrading your offsite backup capabilities.

Rubrik can help. Rubrik’s platform manages backups across physical, virtual and cloud environments—including on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid configurations. Its single management plane simplifies policy automation, data orchestration and rapid restore capability. Contact us today for more information on how Rubrik can support your backup and recovery needs.