3-2-1 rule obsolete as backups come under fire
Ransomware has become increasingly ruthless, with attackers often targeting backups before making their presence known.
This means that by the time an enterprise realises it is under attack, its backups have been encrypted or leaked.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Cybersecurity Outlook finds ransomware is a top concern for global CEOs and CISOs alike.
For organisations across Africa, the risk of being hit by ransomware has increased exponentially.
According to Interpol, cybercrime is rising across the continent and accounts for more than 30% of all reported crime in Western and Eastern Africa, and there were nearly 18,000 ransomware detections in South Africa alone last year.
The impacts of ransomware attacks can be devastating – costly ransoms – which growing numbers of victims opt to pay, as well as fines, the cost of remediation efforts and extensive downtime, and the potential for serious reputational damage.
As ransomware attackers become more devious, the traditional approach to backups is no longer enough.
Once, the 3-2-1 rule – making three copies of your data, storing them on two different types of storage media, and keeping one of those copies off-site – was considered best practice.
Today, this approach is becoming obsolete, since any malware will most likely be backed up across all connected backup storage devices.
The safer approach is the 3-2-1-1 strategy, with one additional copy that is completely isolated and immutable.
Huawei Cloud’s Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR) uses a 3-2-1-1 strategy and WORM (Write Once, Read Many) technology to create an immutable, offline copy no attacker can ever delete or encrypt.
This makes it possible to restore your data from the last, airgapped device, even if all other copies have been compromised.
Huawei Cloud’s immutable backup vaults redefine data protection with simple, efficient backup for multiple types of cloud servers, including ECS, HECS, and BMS.
The solution is elastic and cost-effective, because you only pay for what you use, which greatly reduces fixed asset investments and backup costs.
Huawei Cloud’s extensive security portfolio
Huawei Cloud’s CBR is part of an extensive portfolio of Huawei Cloud integrated, end-to-end data resilience and cloud security solutions to turn security concerns into security confidence.
This is in line with the directive from Zhengfei Ren, the founder of Huawei, who said: “Place the company’s responsibility for safeguarding our customers’ cybersecurity and business above our own commercial interests.”
Huawei Cloud invests heavily in R&D to continually raise the security posture of our cloud products and services.
Huawei Cloud has over 120 international security and compliance certifications including PCI 3DS, TISAX, ISO 27799, ISO/IEC 27701, ISO/IEC 27034, CSA STAR V4, SOC 2 Type 2, and Germany’s C5.
Huawei has also led and participated in the development of more than 10 cloud security standards, and released more than 50 security white papers.
Not only have we built an outstandingly secure and trustworthy cloud platform, we also share our security and compliance experience and capabilities as services.
Customers can take advantage of more than 20 Huawei Cloud native security services and over 400 products aggregated in our ecosystem to build a comprehensive security system, says from Huawei Cloud South Africa.
Combining over 20 years of experience with systematic, practical, and intelligent security operations, global security compliance capabilities, and full-stack technical coverage, Huawei Cloud has built a full-stack security service system that features one advanced security centre and seven layers of defense.
This ensures service continuity, data security, and continuous compliance, and makes Huawei Cloud one of the most secure clouds in the world.
With Huawei Cloud’s deep commitment to best practice security, it’s no wonder thousands of leading international enterprises depend on us to help secure their systems, data and operations.
Our customers include household names in the government, manufacturing, automotive, finance, energy, IT, transport and logistics sectors.
For example, Air China depends on Huawei Cloud for its anti-tampering system for multiple cloud native scenarios, uses SecMaster for its unified security operations, and harnesses various Huawei Cloud security services.
Integrated cloud native security and operations by Huawei Cloud safeguard FAW Toyota’s digital transformation; and Xishanju Games leverages a Terabyte scale cloud native anti-DDoS service by Huawei Cloud to ensure uninterrupted gaming experiences.
To learn more about Huawei Cloud’s Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR), go to: https://www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/product/cbr.html
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