What is the purpose of maintaining secure backups in data security?

• A. To ensure data can be recovered after loss
• B. To increase risk
• C. To expose data
• D. To replace encryption

Answer: (A)

Having secure backups is about ensuring you can recover data after loss or corruption. Backups act as a safety net for events like hardware failure, accidental deletion, software glitches, or cyberattacks, allowing you to restore systems and data to a usable state with minimal downtime and financial impact. Keeping backups secure—through encryption, strict access controls, and write-once or immutable storage—helps preserve confidentiality and integrity of the copies themselves, so restoration doesn’t create new vulnerabilities. It’s not about increasing risk, exposing data, or replacing encryption; encryption protects data itself, while backups provide the restore capability when needed. The practical goal is reliable recoverability to maintain business continuity after an incident.