Failing to utilize backup tape a mistake
Imagine your business becomes entirely flooded, snowed in, burned to the ground or leveled by an earthquake. Offsite data storage of any kind would help ensure business continuity, so long as the storage center was far enough away that it was not also affected. If, however, the crisis event is initiated online, infiltrating database and server security systems, stealing corporate data and compromising critical structures, what kind of safeguards will an online service offer?
A growing industry
Those outside the tape tracking industry like to say that these backups are a dying breed. On the contrary, however – DABCC wrote that market specialists are acknowledging that tape is no longer the most popular primary storage tool, but it is the most reliable and absolutely critical to deep archiving, Big Data and handling quantities of information essential to corporate continuity in a way that no virtualized or digital infrastructure can replicate.
“As everything is additive and customers have multiple environments, tape is going to stay around for a while,” said VMWare’s Dave Vellante told Siliconangle. He said that companies are picking up other storage solutions less quickly than naysayers to backup tape would like, as IT managers and others involved in data security recognize the value of keeping tape tracking in the workplace.
Coming back from the brink
These tools are known to be durable and reliable. Businesses understand that they can put information on backup tape, ship it remotely and have a safeguard in case of disaster, no matter how severe the crisis might be. Especially when other hardware and physical holdings are destroyed, having a remote center for data storage that can be encrypted, stored offline and shipped without worry of data being compromised is a critical part of any business continuity plan.
Security Info Watch wrote that companies in areas regularly affected by large-scale natural disasters regularly invest in off site media management specifically to avoid dissolution in the event a business should come under siege. Housing this information nearby would negate the point of remote storage, and putting data in the cloud would be inaccessible in an area with no internet connectivity, so investing in physical storage is the only sensible solution.