Thinking about the region you place your backups is quite key for many reasons. When you decide to choose the region or availability zone provided by your cloud provider, you ought to think about the services and features, latency, disaster recovery, security and compliance that apply to a specific region. This blog sheds a light on the specific reasons and why they are important. 

Difference Between Regions vs Availability Zones

Availability Zones are a subset of Regions. You may have many availability zones in distinct locations within a Region. For the major cloud providers, the availability zones provide significantly low-latent network connectivity within a region. Regions are more widely dispersed in separate geographical locations.

Why You Should Consider Using Regions and Availability Zones

Disaster Recovery

Backups can save you a fortune when disaster strikes. Depending on your DR strategies, the redundancy of your backups can be quite key. It is a good idea to think about storing your backups in two or more regions; the reason being, you will create redundancy so that you can conveniently access the backups in case disaster strikes in one region. Backup Ninja gives you the flexibility of choosing from our cloud storage providers in as many regions as you wish.

Latency 

When you have to constantly update your backups to different regions, you need to pay attention to your latency needs. Depending on the volume of data that you intend to backup, you may require a low latent network to guarantee that your backups are stored with minimal delay. A high latent network may be a reason why your backup operations may fail; or worse, data corruption. High latency coupled with misconfigured network timeouts and retries in your backup system is not what you may desire if you need reliable backups.

Compliance and Security

Depending on the jurisdictions and the industry that a company resides in, different standards, laws, and regulations may apply. Non-compliance with some of the laws and regulations may attract heavy fines. As you consider storing backups in different regions, you need to consider the regions to which laws and regulations are easy for your company to adhere to.

Final Thoughts

Regions and availability zones are quite key in a cloud backup journey. You need to pay attention to regions lest you either get into backup reliability or compliance issues which can cost you. Backup Ninja supports over 70 data center locations so do get in touch in case you are missing support for a particular location.