Enterprises today focus on data redundancy for reasons like data backup and recovery, data availability, disaster recovery, and cyber resilience. The traditional approach of data redundancy means creating multiple copies of data and storing them in different locations.

While data redundancy can be beneficial, it’s important to examine the carbon impact of creating and storing multiple data copies, as well as all unnecessary storage costs and complexity.

This blog focuses on the impact of data redundancy on the environment and shows how distributed cloud architecture helps enterprises achieve redundancy without replication.

Data redundancy and cyber resilience.

Data redundancy is important today for several reasons. Redundant data systems allow businesses to maintain business continuity, ensuring multiple copies of data are available in case of a cyber attack, natural disaster, accidental deletion or hardware failures. Many industries also have legal and compliance requirements to ensure data integrity and availability.

The 3-2-1 data redundancy rule for cyber resilience means having three copies of your data stored on two different storage media and one copy stored offsite. The crux of this approach is that if one copy of your data is lost or corrupted, you have at least two others to fall back on.

With 4.88M USD as the global average cost of a data breach in 2024—a 10% increase over last year and the highest total ever—it’s not surprising that many businesses are in a rush to secure their data from cyber attacks with data redundancy.

However, with more and more copies of data – and the storage needed for all the data – what is the impact of all this data redundancy on the environment?

Data redundancy and carbon emissions.

The explosive growth of data is staggering, with 90% of the world’s data generated in just the last two years. While moving to the cloud often seems like a modern solution, it’s essential to evaluate its hidden environmental impact.

Data storage today represents 2X the carbon impact of the global airline industry and is continually growing. In just 2023 alone, there were 120 zettabytes of data created. These additional copies significantly increase energy consumption and contribute to the carbon footprint of data storage.

With data storage already rivaling the carbon impact of major industries, this redundancy magnifies the environmental toll, challenging IT to rethink how companies store and manage data sustainably.

This educational video on the cloud’s impact on the environment helps explain further.

You can get redundancy without replication.

The distributed cloud from Storj eliminates the need for costly (and often complex) multi-region replication.

Storj does not rely on replication to achieve durability, but instead uses Reed Solomon erasure coding, which has been around since 1960 and is used everywhere from CDs, deep space communication, barcodes, advanced RAID-like applications–you name it. Erasure coding is a method of data redundancy where data is broken into pieces and expanded to ensure high durability and security. When a file is uploaded to Storj, the client first encrypts it and then applies erasure coding. Only a subset of these pieces are needed to reconstruct the original file.

In the case of Storj, pieces of a given file are globally distributed. To download a segment, only the fastest third of the drives are needed. For example, a person viewing a video in Mumbai will likely get the video from different drives than the person viewing that video in Memphis—who will get it from different drives than the people in Melbourne, Marrakesh, or Montevideo. Storj is able to deliver globally fast and consistent performance without increasing the expansion factor, reducing both economic and carbon costs.

Good for you and the planet.

Through the Storj distributed architecture, businesses can tap into the benefits of redundancy without replication.

• Security - All data stored on Storj is client-side encrypted and erasure coded.
• Durability - Storj distributes data across a global network of storage nodes, reducing the risk of data loss or access challenges during disasters, outages, and threats.
• Efficiency - Erasure coding allows efficient storage and retrieval of data, even in the event of node failures.
• Cost savings - Storj eliminates the need for multi-region replication.
• Sustainability - With no need to build, operate and power new data centers for data replication (and data storage in general), Storj helps avoid carbon emissions.

Redundancy without data replication delivers a myriad of benefits and Storj is helping to lead the innovation in digital sustainability. Try out Storj object storage today.