Should backups be encrypted?

Yes, especially copies that leave your premises or sit with a cloud provider. A stolen backup tape, disk or cloud bucket is otherwise a complete copy of your company's data, and encryption turns it into useless bytes for the thief; under the GDPRGDPR: General Data Protection Regulation. The EU data protection law (Regulation (EU) 2016/679)., encryption is one of the security measures named in Article 32 and can affect whether a lost copy has to be reported to the people concerned. The hard part is the key. If the encryption key is stored only on the backup server and that server is destroyed or encrypted by ransomware, your backups are unreadable to you as well. Keep the key, or the recovery key, in a separate, documented place that does not depend on the systems being backed up, such as a password manager with offline access or a sealed copy in a safe, and include retrieving it in your restore tests. Encrypting backups protects confidentiality; it does not replace immutability.

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