Businesses need to start caring about asset protection
Companies like to think the only thing they need to protect is their physical assets, but information is possibly more valuable than any single item sitting in their offices. Corporate losses can wind up in the millions of dollars when hackers get their hands on critical information, but despite warnings and calls to action, business leaders insist on operating oblivious to these threats.
Responding to danger
Of course, after disaster strikes, companies are quick to say they don’t understand how an incident occurred, though the simple truth is that they didn’t do anything to prevent it. The State of Information Report put out annually by Symantec shows that about half of a company’s value is locked in its data, totalling over $1 billion in collective worth. On average, even small businesses are carrying an overall data load of more than 500 terabytes per entity, showing how essential Big Data backup tape solutions are becoming for successful storage.
Other storage methods can be expensive, and Symantec found that small businesses were paying a few hundred dollars more per employee for file maintenance than larger entities, mostly because of the scale of the services purchased. Still, backup tape is affordable and easier to maintain in the long run, considering all the other costs that must be calculated when determining the best storage solutions.
Shifting tape stories
At the same time, some online competitors are trying to build “backup clouds,” structures they claim are more reliable than regular cloud storage but still exist in an easily accessible Internet interface. The Register reported that Amazon’s Glacier is offering large, affordable data solutions online that it hopes will remove backup tape from the corporate picture, but apparently the company forgot the big draw of tape solutions.
Hosting information online is inherently dangerous thanks to hackers and faulty security protocols. One of the best incentives for archiving and hosting in remote offline sites is that data can’t be accessed by a third party, and encryptions make tapes unreadable to thieves without the proper hardware and decoders.
In the interest of a diverse disaster continuity plan, having two backups in the same place is redundant and therefore not cost effective. An organization can feel free to use the cloud for daily use options, but online storage like Glacier just puts the entire archive structure at risk. In the end, tape is still cheaper and more reliable.