Downtime can cost businesses thousands of dollars per minute, yet many recovery strategies still rely on backups stored in a single location. If that site is compromised, whether by a natural disaster, hardware failure, or cyberattack, business continuity and critical data and are immediately at risk.
Geo-redundancy solves this problem by maintaining synchronized copies of backup data in geographically separate locations, ensuring availability even during a regional outage.
As a key feature of x360Recover from Axcient™, a ConnectWise company, Geo+ provides managed service providers (MSPs) and IT teams with a turnkey, scalable solution to strengthen their disaster resilience, streamline operations, and meet compliance mandates; all without adding hardware, bandwidth strain, or administrative overhead.
Let’s dive into defining geo-redundancy, its business advantages, and how Geo+ delivers those benefits for partners with x360Recover. We will also cover its essential addition to every modern business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy.
Geo+ key takeaways
- Enhances business continuity by using geo-redundant backups that mirror your data in multiple regions across the US, ensuring operations continue even during localized outages or disasters.
- Optimizes bandwidth and efficiency through cloud-to-cloud replication, minimizing strain on protected systems while maintaining rapid backup synchronization.
- Supports flexible deployment and works seamlessly with direct-to-cloud and appliance-based backup configurations, including bring-your-own-device (BYOD) options for versatile protection.
- Gives MSPs and IT teams granular control with per-client, per-user, or per-system enablement, allowing you to tailor backup coverage and provide predictable, usage-based costs.
- Strengthens compliance and cyber insurance readiness by supporting the 3-2-1 backup rule and aligning with modern data protection and recovery best practices.
What is geo-redundancy, and why does it matter?
Geo-redundancy refers to storing and maintaining data and IT resources across multiple geographically dispersed locations. Geo+ provides resilience to ensure that if one data center, geographical region, or cloud availability zone goes down due to a natural disaster, power outage, cyberattack, or regional event, business operations can continue with minimal disruption by failing over to another unaffected location. to another unaffected location.
Here’s why so many organizations are moving to geo-redundant backup solutions:
- Immutability and compliance: Redundant backup copies reduce the risk of data loss while also helping meet cybersecurity regulations and laws and insurance requirements for retention, immutability, and geographic separation.
- Always-on availability: If one site fails, employees, clients, or partners can still access systems and data from a different region without experiencing downtime.
- Workload distribution: Load balancing and failover between geo-distributed environments improve performance and reduce the risk of bottlenecks.
- Regional failover: When a primary site is disrupted, geo-redundant backup strategies allow recovery to secondary sites in other regions, ensuring rapid recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
- Disaster recovery: Geo-redundancy protects against natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as man-made disruptions such as power grid failures, cyberattacks, or geopolitical events.
For MSPs, geo-redundancy offers a powerful way to safeguard client operations, strengthen service-level agreements, and differentiate offerings with higher reliability and enhanced protection. By maintaining backup copies and recovery sites in multiple geographic locations, MSPs can quickly failover client workloads, minimize downtime, and protect against data loss, reinforcing trust and fostering long-term client relationships.
Geo-redundancy: An essential component of IT backup configurations
For IT departments, geo-redundancy is equally valuable because it supports uninterrupted business operations across distributed workforces, customer-facing platforms, and mission-critical applications. In the event of a regional disaster, workloads can be shifted seamlessly to preserved locations, helping enterprises meet stringent recovery time and compliance requirements. In both cases, geo-redundancy reduces risk, increases business continuity, and provides a critical safety net in an unpredictable threat landscape.
Strengthening 3-2-1 compliance and cyber insurance with geo-redundancy
Geo-redundancy directly supports the 3-2-1 backup rule and reinforces cyber insurability by eliminating the single-site dependency that leaves backups vulnerable to disasters and targeted attacks. The 3-2-1 rule requires three copies of data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept off-site. By replicating backups across geographically separate data centers, geo-redundancy ensures that the off-site copy is not only physically isolated but also immune to regional disruptions. This level of distribution makes it significantly easier for MSPs and enterprise IT teams to demonstrate to clients, auditors, and regulators that their data is protected in accordance with industry best practices.
From a cyber insurance perspective, geo-redundancy strengthens insurability by reducing both risk and liability. Insurers are increasingly expecting organizations to demonstrate their ability to withstand ransomware attacks, outages, or natural disasters without incurring catastrophic data loss. A geo-redundant strategy provides evidence of resilience, showing that even if a primary backup location is compromised, a clean and recoverable copy exists in another region. This not only improves the likelihood of policy approval but can also help secure more favorable terms and lower premiums.
For MSPs, it means being able to offer clients a higher level of assurance and compliance readiness. For IT teams, it supports business continuity commitments and builds confidence with boards, regulators, and insurers alike.
Download the Cyber Insurance Guide for MSPs for practical information on obtaining and maintaining cyber insurance.
x360Recover Geo+ delivers geo-redundancy to your stack
Geo+ is a geo-redundant storage enhancement for one of the ConnectWise business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions, x360Recover. It’s designed specifically for organizations in the US to extend resilience by automatically replicating backup data across geographically separate ConnectWise data centers.
What Geo+ does
Geo+ automatically duplicates backup restore points from your primary ConnectWise vault to a secondary vault located in a different US data center. For example, replicating from Salt Lake City to Atlanta.
Geo+ delivers enterprise-grade redundancy without the cost or complexity of managing secondary replication sites or maintaining additional hardware. Because it’s fully cloud-based, IT providers can extend geo-redundant protection to any environment, whether direct-to-cloud, appliance-based, or BYOD, without disrupting existing workflows. This flexibility makes Geo+ a cost-efficient way to scale resilience across multiple locations or client environments from a single management console.
How Geo+ works
Geo+ works seamlessly with both direct-to-cloud (hardware-free) backups and appliance-based deployments into the ConnectWise cloud. Admins can enable Geo+ at three levels through the x360Recover manager interface:
- When adding a new client/user
- Per client/user
- Per individual protected system
All existing and future restore points, including incremental backups, are replicated to the secondary vault. Geo+ also applies the same retention policies to the secondary copies to ensure compliance and adherence to SLAs. Recoveries from the geo-redundant copy must be performed through ConnectWise support, although self-recovery may be added.
Why choose x360Recover Geo+
Built on the robust foundation of x360Recover’s chain-free, encrypted, and highly reliable BCDR solution, Geo+ takes data resilience a step further:
- Automatic backup replication: Mirrors cloud or appliance-based backup data across two US data centers, eliminating the need for redundant backups and reducing bandwidth impact.
- Flexible deployment support: Works equally well with direct-to-cloud and appliance-based setups, including BYOD or purchased appliances.
- Optional per client/user or device: Selectively enable it only for clients, users, or systems that require it, providing granular control and granular coverage.
- Fast and easy activation: Can be switched on or off from the x360Recover manager interface at the client, user, or device level, streamlining adoption.
- Billing transparency: Incurs additional usage-based charges, calculated on a per-protected-system-per-day basis. Usage toggles (enable/disable/re-enable) are tracked for easy monitoring and appropriate billing.
- Compliance and insurance best practices: Supports the 3-2-1 backup rule and the cybersecurity best practices that insurance carriers require for continued, full coverage.
- Reliable recovery: When a primary location is impacted, backup data is safe in a secondary vault, providing fast access for rapid restoration.
If you’re ready to reinforce your BCDR strategies with geo-redundant data from x360Recover Geo+, start your free trial to see how simple geo-redundancy can be.
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