Conventional backups — manual copies, a single server, or a one-cloud solution — are no longer sufficient. Modern ransomware now targets backups themselves. Jurisdictional risk via laws like the U.S. CLOUD Act means that even data stored in Europe on U.S.-based platforms can be compelled. European regulations such as GDPR, NIS2, and the Schrems II decision demand proof of resilience and data sovereignty. Corporate and public-sector disruptions in Europe — from airports to healthcare — highlight the stakes. To remain operational and compliant in 2025, organizations must adopt immutable, verifiable, multi-location, sovereign backup architectures. fragmentiX Quantum Safe Backup offers fragmentation, immutability, and sovereignty built for these challenges.

The Outdated Assumption: “One Backup Is Enough”

Many decision-makers still assume that maintaining a backup somewhere else is enough. That assumption dates from a time when threats were accidental. Today, attackers act strategically. The ENISA Threat Landscape identifies ransomware as a persistent top threat, increasingly targeting recovery systems. When your restoration relies on a single copy, that copy becomes the first target.

Manual and Single-Destination Backups: Failure by Design

Manual backups — copying to external drives or ad hoc archives — are unreliable by nature. They depend on human discipline, consistency, and verification. Automated backups to a single destination (a server, NAS, or cloud bucket) centralize risk. Breach reports repeatedly show that organizations believing their backups were recoverable discovered corruption or encryption only when it was too late.

Ransomware’s Evolution: From Encryption to Backup Sabotage

Ransomware has evolved beyond simple encryption. Attackers now locate, corrupt, or delete backups, purge snapshots, and tamper with recovery catalogs before triggering encryption. The recovery phase becomes contested. Guidance from CISA and ENISA’s Technical Implementation Guidance under NIS2 both recommend immutable and offline storage as essential countermeasures.

Cloud Dependency and Legal Exposure: When Data Is Not Truly Yours

Public cloud storage offers convenience and durability — but not sovereignty. Two major risks persist:

1. Provider outages and dependency: In September 2025, a ransomware attack disrupted European airports, revealing how third-party failures can cascade across critical systems. Outages at major cloud providers have shown the same effect: when recovery depends on one platform, downtime becomes business-critical.
2. Jurisdictional reach of U.S. law: The CLOUD Act allows U.S. authorities to compel providers to disclose data they control, even when stored in the EU. This creates exposure for European entities using U.S.-based services.

Earlier incidents like the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) ransomware attack demonstrated how the inability to recover securely can disrupt entire national infrastructures and cost millions in remediation.

European Regulatory Pressure: NIS2, GDPR, Schrems II

Backup resilience is now a regulatory expectation in Europe. Under GDPR, data integrity and availability are mandatory. If data cannot be restored quickly, organizations risk compliance violations. The NIS2 Directive requires essential and important entities to maintain business continuity even under attack. ENISA’s guidance specifies technical measures such as immutability and isolation for critical data. The Schrems II judgment further raised the bar by invalidating the EU-US Privacy Shield, requiring additional safeguards for data stored with foreign providers. In this landscape, the location and legal framework of your backup provider are as important as encryption strength.

Requirements for a Modern Backup Strategy

To meet today’s technical, legal, and operational challenges, a modern backup architecture must satisfy:

• Sovereignty: Data stored in EU-controlled environments, minimizing foreign legal exposure.
• Isolation & Immutability: Recovery data protected from modification or deletion by attackers.
• Geographic & Provider Diversity: Avoid single-provider or local dependencies.
• Verifiability: Regular integrity checks and recovery drills.
• Post-quantum confidentiality: Protection even when classical encryption may be vulnerable.

These principles reflect the recommendations of ENISA and CISA and form the foundation of a resilient, compliant data protection strategy. They are fully realized through the fragmentiX Quantum Safe Backup solution — a secure, automated system that combines sovereignty, automation, and quantum-safe protection to ensure business continuity under any circumstance.

From Redundancy to Sovereignty: The fragmentiX Quantum Safe Backup Solution

fragmentiX Quantum Safe Backup is the straightforward, sovereign answer to modern data protection risks. It protects your information from ransomware, insider threats, and unauthorized access — automatically and without operational complexity.

An automated backup is created locally, then encrypted, fragmented, and distributed by a fragmentiX appliance made in Austria. Each fragment is stored across two independent EU cloud providers and one in Canada, all object-locked to prevent editing, deletion, or encryption. Thanks to its information-theoretically secure (ITS) architecture, no single fragment contains useful information, and no provider or attacker can ever reconstruct your data.

Built with trusted European components — fragmentiX appliances, SEP sesam software from Germany, and DELL PowerEdge servers — the system delivers fully automated, quantum-safe backup that cannot be altered or compromised.

fragmentiX Quantum Safe Backup makes resilience simple: sovereign, verifiable, and completely under your control.

Conclusion

In 2025, conventional backups — manual, single-destination, or cloud-only — are inadequate against targeted attacks, outages, and legal exposure. European organizations must adopt backup architectures that assume compromise, enforce integrity, and guarantee sovereignty. fragmentiX Quantum Safe Backup offers a clear path forward: fragmentation, immutability, sovereignty, and verifiability rather than blind trust.

Get Started

Secure your data before it’s too late. Contact fragmentiX to discuss how Quantum Safe Backup can protect your organization with sovereign, quantum-resistant resilience.

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Further Reading

• ENISA Threat Landscape 2024–2025 – Overview of major European cyber threats
• CISA StopRansomware Guide – U.S. guidance on ransomware mitigation
• European Commission – NIS2 Directive Overview
• GDPR Article 32 – Integrity and Availability of Processing Systems
• Irish HSE Cyberattack Report
• fragmentiX Technology Overview – Learn more about Information-Theoretically Secure (ITS) fragmentation