Data Vaulting

What Does Data Vaulting Mean?

Data vaulting is a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that requires a copy of each data backup to be stored in a place that's physically isolated from primary backup and production environments. To protect backups from theft, hardware failures and other threats, data vaults are either stored virtually in the cloud or physically in a different local data center.

Data vaulting strategies are often used to protect sensitive financial data and this type of secondary backup is often encrypted before it is stored. Institutions like banks and insurance firms typically have some sort of data vaulting scheme in place to prevent data loss. Like bank vaults, data vaults need to be connected to auxiliary power sources and are often secured by armed guards.

Techopedia Explains Data Vaulting

The purpose of data vaulting is ensure that in the event of a security exploit, such as a ransomware or RaaS attack, at least one copy of a backup remains isolated, and hopefully safe.

Data Vaulting and the 3-2-1 Backup Rule

Data vaulting supports the 3-2-1 backup rule. According to this popular backup strategy, IT administrators should keep three copies of every backup, use at least two different storage mediums and store at least one of the backup copies offsite.

The primary goal of the 3-2-1 backup rule is to ensure that if an organization's primary backup copy become corrupt, there will always be a pristine copy that can be used to restore data in a timely manner.