A great example of why tapes don’t work
Friday, June 30th, 2006Iron Mountain have ‘lost‘ 2 truck loads of tapes in the space of a month. There’s a few reasons why this is a huge story and a significant hit to their customers business as well as their own.
The data on the tapes can be cracked, as they admit ‘using sophisticated equipment’, which really means someone with know-how can do it. Depending on what the data is, it may be used for all types of fraud by the thief, as well as the fact that the backup data copy is now gone and there a security hole to be plugged here until it is replicated again.
Of course if you have any sense you wouldn’t touch tape backup any more - it’s an antiquated technology. It rely’s on a poor medium, manual processes, and has logistical issues. Backing up on more reliable media like a redundant array of hard drives through a VPN in an off-site secure data centre makes much more sense. (heehee … and guess who can provide this for you? !!)
And the great thing about this Moore’s Law business is that the kind of system I just mentioned is not only FAR FAR better than tape backup, it’s also cheaper to do. Faster … more reliable … easier to access and restore … automated and secure : it boggles the mind that many CTO’s and SME’s still consider tape backup a viable solution.