A hospital stores nightly backup tapes of patient records in a fire-rated cabinet in the same data centre that hosts the production servers. During a tabletop exercise, the CISO is asked to recommend the BEST improvement to the media protection strategy. Which option should the CISO recommend?
- AReplace the magnetic tapes with higher-capacity LTO cartridges to extend retention.
- BAdd a second fire-rated cabinet in the same data centre and split the tapes between them.
- CMove a copy of the backup tapes to a secure offsite storage facility with environmental controls. Correct
- DIncrease the frequency of backups from nightly to every six hours.
Why A is wrong: Upgrading the tape format improves capacity and read speed, but it does not address the underlying risk that production data and backups can be destroyed by the same site-level event.
Why B is wrong: Two cabinets in the same room still share fire, flood, and physical-access threats, so the control reduces the likelihood of cabinet failure but not the dominant site-level risk.
Why C is correct: Storing a copy of backup media offsite in a secure, environmentally controlled facility protects against a single disaster destroying both production data and its only backup, which is the core principle of media protection for recovery.
Why D is wrong: More frequent backups improve the recovery point objective, but creating more tapes in the same vulnerable location does not protect the media from a site-wide loss.