3-2-1-0 Backup,
The Insurer Standard
Cyber insurers now expect a real offline copy. Firevault Bunkers deliver the 0 in 3-2-1-0 with the audit trail underwriters want to see.
What 3-2-1-0 Actually Means
A plain English breakdown of the rule insurers, regulators and boards keep referencing.
3 Copies of Data
Insurers expect you to hold the live production copy plus two independent backup copies. One copy alone is not resilience, it is hope. The third copy exists so that loss of one backup never leaves you exposed.
2 Different Media
Holding both backups on the same storage technology means a single firmware bug or vendor incident can take both copies at once. Different media reduces correlated failure and is increasingly explicit in policy wording.
1 Offsite Copy
An offsite copy survives site events, fire, flood and physical compromise of your primary location. Insurers want to see geographical separation with documented chain of custody.
0 Errors and 0 Online Copies
The modern addition. Zero verified errors on restore, and at least one copy that is fully offline so ransomware cannot reach it. This is where Iron Mountain tape and Firevault Bunkers compete, and where most cloud only strategies fall short.
Tape, Cold Cloud, or Bunker
The three credible ways to satisfy the offline copy requirement, and where each one wins or loses.
Iron Mountain Tape
Tape ejected and stored offsite is a genuine physical air gap. The tradeoff is operational. Recoveries can take days, handling errors are common and verifying restores at scale is painful.
AWS Glacier and Cold Cloud
Glacier and similar tiers are still reachable through the public cloud control plane. Retrieval is slower and cheaper than hot storage, but the data remains addressable, governed by IAM policies and exposed to identity compromise.
Firevault Bunkers
Firevault Offline Secure Storage delivers a tape style physical air gap with scheduled, identity verified online windows for restores. UK based bunkers, audit trails written for insurers, and no per gigabyte egress to budget around.
Underwriter ready evidence pack
Read the full Firevault 3-2-1-1-0 briefing, or explore wider critical national infrastructure resilience.
Cyber Insurance and 3-2-1-0
Make your offline copy insurer ready
Talk to Mark Fermor and the Firevault team about evidencing 3-2-1-0 with a Layer 1 air gapped bunker copy.
Takes about 2 minutes. No account needed.