The core of the question is protecting data from a natural disaster by using a geographically separate facility. This practice is known as off-site disaster recovery. By renting a colocation space in another part of the country, the organization establishes a secondary location that is unlikely to be affected by the same disaster that impacts the primary site. This geographic separation is the fundamental principle of an off-site strategy, ensuring business continuity and data availability in the event of a regional catastrophe.

A. On-site: This practice involves keeping data backups or redundant systems at the same physical location as the primary data, offering no protection against a site-wide disaster like a fire or flood.

B. Replication: This is the process of copying data. While replication is a mechanism used to send data to an off-site location, "off-site" is the specific disaster recovery practice described in the scenario.

C. Retention: This refers to policies that dictate how long data is stored. Data retention is unrelated to the physical location of data for disaster recovery purposes.

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-34 Rev. 1

Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems. Section 4.3.2

"Alternate Storage Site

" states: "An alternate storage site is used for storage of backup media... The site should be geographically separated from the primary site so as not to be susceptible to the same hazards." This directly supports the concept of using a geographically distant location (off-site) for disaster protection.

2. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud (July 2021). Page 6

in the section "Backup and Restore

" discusses storing backups in a separate AWS Region. It states

"By replicating your data to another Region

you can protect your data in the unlikely event of a regional disruption." This exemplifies the off-site practice in a cloud context.

3. Microsoft Azure Documentation

Disaster recovery and high availability for Azure applications. In the section "Azure services that provide disaster recovery

" it describes Azure Site Recovery

which "replicates workloads to a secondary location." The use of a secondary

geographically distinct location is the definition of an off-site strategy.