An air-gap or offline is a way of isolating your critical data by separating a copy either physically (removing the tape out of the drive) or not accessible from the network ( network ports or routes disabled). An immutable backup is a copy of data that has role-based access controls and other types of authentications and cannot be changed or deleted until a set time has expired. However, it is not “offline” like an air-gap backup is, as it is still connected and accessible from the network. There are multiple technology vendors that leverage this type of immutability whether on-premises or in the cloud and can include Object Lock (S3), object storage, secure snapshots, and the hardened repository from Veeam for example.
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