Processing load for remote zones and inter-zone network traffic during geographically distributed (GEO) erasure coding can be reduced. In one aspect, GEO erasure coding can be performed in two phases, wherein each phase can be distributed between zones. Moreover, during a first phase, partially-finished coding chunks can be generated and provided to the remote zones. Further, during a second phase the remote zones can combine the received partially-finished coding chunks independently, to generate a complete coding chunk that can be utilized for data recovery.