IT & Data Services
Offsite data storage
Keeping all of your data in one place — on-site, on a single platform, or under a single point of failure — is one of the most common and most consequential risks an organisation can carry. Our offsite data storage service provides secure, documented, and independently held copies of your critical data and physical records, giving you the resilience, compliance evidence, and recovery capability your business depends on when it matters most.
Why offsite storage matters
Ransomware, fire, flood, theft, hardware failure, accidental deletion, and insider sabotage are all capable of destroying on-site data — often without warning and faster than any response can contain. Organisations that store their only backup in the same physical or logical environment as their primary data are, in practice, operating without a meaningful recovery capability.
Offsite storage — whether physical media, cloud-based backup, or managed tape and disk vaulting — ensures that a clean, uncompromised, independently held copy of your critical data and records exists regardless of what happens to your primary environment. It is a fundamental component of any credible business continuity or disaster recovery plan, and a requirement under most data protection and IT security frameworks.
Beyond recovery, offsite storage of physical records also addresses regulatory retention obligations — ensuring that documents which must be kept for defined periods are held securely, indexed, and retrievable on demand without occupying valuable on-site space.
Storage options
The following destruction options are available.
Cloud & managed backup
Encrypted, automated backup of your critical data to secure, geographically separated cloud infrastructure. We assess your current backup posture, identify gaps in coverage or recovery time objectives, and help implement or improve cloud backup solutions that meet your RTO and RPO requirements.
- RTO & RPO assessment
- Encrypted, automated backup
- Geographically separated storage
- Regular restore testing & verification
Tape & removable media vaulting
For organisations requiring an air-gapped or physically isolated backup copy, we provide secure collection, transportation, and offsite vaulting of backup tapes, external drives, and other removable media — with full chain-of-custody documentation and scheduled rotation services.
- Secure collection & transportation
- Environmentally controlled vaulting
- Chain-of-custody documentation
- Scheduled rotation & retrieval
Physical document & records storage
Paper-based records subject to regulatory retention requirements — legal, financial, HR, contracts, and compliance documentation — can be stored securely offsite in indexed, catalogued storage. We manage collection, barcoding, inventory, and on-demand retrieval, freeing up on-site space while maintaining full access and audit capability.
- Indexed & barcoded box storage
- On-demand file & box retrieval
- Retention schedule management
- Secure destruction at end of retention
Document scanning & digital archiving
Physical records can be digitised and stored as encrypted, searchable digital archives — reducing physical storage requirements while maintaining accessibility and compliance. Ideal for organisations transitioning to digital-first operations or needing to satisfy retention obligations without the overhead of physical file management.
- High-volume document scanning
- OCR & searchable PDF output
- Encrypted digital archive storage
- Indexed for rapid retrieval
Immutable & air-gapped backup
Ransomware specifically targets backup infrastructure — and connected backups are frequently encrypted alongside primary data. Immutable and air-gapped backup solutions ensure that a protected, unalterable copy of your data exists beyond the reach of any attack. We advise on and implement appropriate immutable storage architectures for your environment.
- Write-once, read-many (WORM) storage
- Air-gapped physical & cloud options
- Ransomware-resilient architecture
- Recovery validation & testing
Backup audit & DR readiness review
Many organisations assume their backups work — until they need to use them. We conduct independent audits of your backup and recovery capability, testing restores, validating coverage, reviewing documentation, and assessing whether your current arrangements would actually support recovery in a real incident.
- End-to-end backup coverage review
- Restore testing & validation
- RTO/RPO gap analysis
- DR plan alignment review
Did you know?
- Ransomware attacks now routinely target connected backup infrastructure first — an estimated 93% of ransomware attacks specifically attempt to destroy or encrypt backup data before deploying the main payload.
- The 3-2-1 backup rule — three copies of data, on two different media types, with one held offsite — is the minimum baseline recommended by the NCSC and virtually every major cybersecurity framework.
- Many organisations discover during an incident that their backups have been silently failing for weeks or months — untested backups offer no more protection than having no backup at all.
- UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 require that personal data can be restored promptly following a physical or technical incident — organisations without a tested offsite recovery capability may be in breach.
- Storing backup media in the same building as primary data — even in a fireproof safe — does not constitute offsite storage and will not satisfy most business continuity frameworks or insurers.
- Physical records must in many cases be retained for 6–7 years under UK law — without a managed offsite solution, organisations often hold far more paper than necessary on-site, increasing both cost and risk.
- Cloud backup alone is not always sufficient — without immutability controls, a compromised admin account can delete cloud backups just as easily as on-premises ones.
Get in touch
Whether you need a backup audit, a managed offsite vaulting arrangement, or help designing a resilient recovery architecture from scratch, we can help. To discuss this service or any of our other IT and data solutions, contact us today.