Of course we’re absolute believers in off-site storage of digital data, especially in our secure solid granite vault. Many of our clients store tape backups, and some keep hard drives and even disks at our vault.

We found a couple recently published white papers that provide excellent commentary on tape backups, dubbed “the optimal low cost storage medium for long term data retention,” and want to share them with our clients and friends.

Both reports are available by following the links included in this Aug. 24, 2011 Business Wire announcement.

The announcement begins:

“The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program Technology Provider Companies, HP, IBM and Quantum, announced today that two recently-released separate studies found that tape had significant total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits over disk, including lower cost per GB, lower operating expenses and lower energy costs.

“The two studies, from the Enterprise Strategy Group and The Clipper Group, evaluated the costs of long-term storage for various scenarios that included tape and disk as the primary storage medium. In each case, the studies found that tape had considerable long-term cost advantages when compared to a scenario that relied on a disk-only solution.”

We recommend you check out the two white papers:

“A Comparative TCO Study: VTLs and Physical Tape” by Mark Peters, Feb. 2011, published by the Enterprise Strategy Group

“In Search of the Long-Term Archiving Solution — Tape Delivers Significant TCO Advantage over Disk” by analysts David Reine and Mike Kahn, Dec. 2010, published by The Clipper Group

The comparative study article reports significant savings for Linear Tape-Open (LTO) versus Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL):

“In a head-to-head comparison, the VTL with deduplication TCO ranges from 1.78 to 2.46 times higher than the LTO-5 tape library TCO. In all cases, the LTO-5 library has a lower TCO and is $436,876 less expensive than the VTL deduplication appliance over five years.”

His case study is eye opening for anyone charged with protecting valuable company information.

From his experience, he assembled 15 laws of security.

15 Laws of Business Security

1. Resources are deployed inversely proportional to actual risk
2. Perceived risk never equals actual risk
3. Security people are never their own customer
4. Cracking systems is 100-times more fun than defending them
5. Security standards are an oxymoron
6. There is always a threat
7. The biggest threat is always in a direction you’re not looking
8. You need two security groups — one to defend and one to attack
9. People expect 100% electronic security
10. Nothing is 100% secure
11. Security and operational requirements are mutually exclusive
12. Hackers are smarter than you — they are younger!
13. Legislation is (and will always be) many years behind
14. As life becomes faster and chaotic, it becomes less secure. But the good news is half-lives are getting shorter too!
15. People are always the biggest risk factor. Machines are perverse, but they ain’t devious, not yet anyway!

For the full article, click here.

Dr Peter Cochrane is the former Chief Technologist for BT and a seasoned IT professional with over 40 years of hands-on management, technology and operational experience across a number of industries.

A guest post by Hugh Smith of FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults

The data security industry continues to evolve. Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) is advocated by many because tape is a secure storage medium and the market continues to look for data security.

Organizations that need to store digital data want peace of mind. Who can give it to them? Hackers are always in the news for accessing what everyone thought was secure online data, but no one has ever hacked a tape in a vault.

Soon I’ll be delivering a presentation at a Nuclear Records Conference on trends in information protection where I’ll point out that tape is still the most secure format. The nuclear industry is required to be failsafe, so they can’t consider the cloud.

The security and access of tape storage over time has delivered impeccable performance, much more so than other forms of information storage.

Energy costs are climbing and the guys with multiple data centers are seeing a huge increase in operating costs. Google says it cost 40% more to store data on discs than an effective D2D2T platform.

The new LTO-5 tape format offers smooth migration and that has been missing. It’s a great advancement for tape.

We recently published an article talking about the heat wave and risks it presented to data centers in potential power outages, equipment shutdowns, CRAC failures and such. We also noted how the offsite storage industry is sailing along in their precisely controlled environments.

The audio file included at the bottom of this post highlights the trend of cloud computing and concerns about exactly where your data is being stored and who really owns it.

Perpetual Storage is one of the only granite vaults in the world where businesses can protect important electronic records. In an emergency back-up tapes or disc drives are usually delivered to clients within two hours.

Thank you to Zions Bank and especially to Chris Redgrave for highlighting the work we do at Perpetual Storage. If you’d like to learn more about our services or tour our vault, please do get in touch.

Earlier this month it was announced that possibly millions of email addresses and names were stolen from one of the country’s largest email delivery agencies, Dallas-based Epsilon (read the Associated Press article published on The Tennessean.

The email addresses stolen from Epsilon may very well result in “phishing” attacks to trick people with accounts at certain financial institutions into entering sensitive account information on fake banking websites.

The data that was stolen allows fraudsters to target people they know have accounts at specific banks, making their phishing more sophisticated and laser-focused.

At Perpetual Storage we are committed to long-term data storage that is safe and secure. Properly protecting valuable information, whether it is on- or off-line, is so critically important.

We have seen many examples of security breaches in cloud computing and electronic data of all kinds.

Storage of sensitive and irreplaceable data on computer tapes, CD’s and hard drives in the Perpetual Storage vault encased in a solid granite mountain, will properly protect companies from loss due to disgruntled employee sabotage, fires, earthquakes and hackers.

At Perpetual Storage, we are security in solid granite.

Just a few weeks ago someone at Google inadvertently deleted some 150,000 Gmail accounts (read about it on CNN Money).

The company scrambled to restore the data, which they did, believe it or not, by using backup tapes (again, the story was published on CNN Money).

The CNN Money article goes on to estimate that Google would probably need 200,000 1.5Tb high-density tapes to back-up all its Gmail users’ data—enough to stack on top of each other and reach four kilometers high!

Isn’t it interesting that in 2011 we’re still struggling with preserving and making permanent online data?

Luckily for Google, it had those back-up tapes at all. What would happen if such a back-up didn’t exist, or were somehow rendered obsolete?

When it comes to protecting electronic data, perhaps the best, most conservative approach is to use tape back-ups and place those back-ups in the safest place you can think of—not in a closet in the office or your home, and certainly not in your car.

Using an insured courier service like that offered by Perpetual Storage, you’re assured that your backed-up data is carefully transported off-site then stored for the long-term in a perfectly protected environment.

Then, if, for some crazy reason, some of your data goes missing for whatever reason, you at least have a back-up tape to restore your data.

With off-site storage, like Perpetual Storage, the client saves data to a storage medium like a flash drive or magnetic tape, and Perpetual Storage couriers transport it to the secure, remote storage facility.

If companies use the cloud, their data is transported through the Internet to file storage usually in an unknown physical location. The data remains online, available and searchable given proper access information.

There are legal considerations when determining which approach is best for your organization.

For example, there is a compelling argument, based on the 2010 lawsuit Johnson v. Neiman, as to why off-site storage is of greater advantage to an organization than cloud storage.

In the Johnson v. Neiman case, the defendants sought an order not to produce e-mail messages located on back-up tapes on the basis that the electronically stored information was not reasonably accessible.

The court agreed. It concluded that “reasonably accessible” is best defined as whether the electronically stored information is kept in an accessible or inaccessible format.

Basically the court said if your data is backed-up on the cloud, that information is accessible. But if it’s off-site, archived and stored in a long-term storage facility, not available online, the information is basically inaccessible.

So, when you determine a back-up or long-term storage solution for your organization, keep in mind that storing data in the cloud means it remains accessible and searchable by discovery teams.

Reference: Bow Tie Law — Arguing Back-Up Tapes Are Not Reasonably Accessible

…cause damage to Fannie Mae’s computer network by entering malicious code that was intended to execute on January 31, 2009.

The worker was a contractor who worked at Fannie Mae’s data center in Urbana, Maryland as a Unix engineer. During – and inadvertently, after – his employment, he had access to all Fannie Mae servers.

As reported in ZDNet:

The tale of the malware bomb plot is a warning shot to all security teams and IT departments. Given the level of layoffs we’ve seen recently, the ranks of disgruntled former employees is likely to grow.

The ZDNet author, Larry Dignan, points out that companies of all sizes should pay attention to employee access to vital information, and have plans in place to prevent unauthorized access and safeguard data.

Off-site storage and protection of digital records is the very mission Perpetual Storage was created to serve. Companies storing data at Perpetual Storage know it’s just a matter of hours before they can retrieve the most recent iteration of their important data. Having that safeguard in place becomes an important part of insuring the success of your business.

However, a survey by the American Bar Association found that 77% of criminals came from within. The most frequently cited group for stealing or damaging company data were computer programmers.

“Hackers have received all the publicity, but the greatest threat by far still comes from individuals who work in the data center,” says Richard Bessenhoffer, vice president of Total Assets Protection, an Arlington, TX consultancy.

The survey questionnaire was distributed to Fortune 500 individuals and to federal, state, and local government agencies. The 179 respondents fielded questions ranging from estimates on total annual losses due to computer crime in the U.S., to views on the need for a federal statute on the punishment of computer criminals; 79% favored such a law.

In an article by attorney Robert P. Bigelow, he makes the case for why management should pay attention and take a proactive role in protecting vital records:

Any organization which fails to institute appropriate security measures can expose not only the organization but its board of directors individually and personally to substantial liability, which can be imposed by contract and or by law. The board of directors of a corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders to protect the assets of the company. Failure to establish and maintain a reasonable security program is a breach of that fiduciary duty; in case of substantial loss, the members of the board may be personally liable to stockholders whose stock has been devalued. The corporation may also be liable to others, either contractually or under the doctrines of tort law (a civil wrong for which the law imposes liability).

Bigelow continues:

Management, whether it realizes it or not, is responsible for the security of the organization’s information system. Sometimes this responsibility is contractual, sometimes it is created by law, and sometimes it will be imposed by the courts. If top management does not act to establish and maintain adequate data security procedures, the organization could be liable for substantial damages . . . and those damages may be collectible from the managers personally!

The operation of a business requires organization and focus, including implementation of effective archiving protocols and procedures.

At Perpetual Storage we help clients manage their long-term storage by providing courier service that routinely picks up electronic data for storage. Having this pick-up schedule in place creates a consistent, reliable schedule for backing up data, and it forces employees to prepare back-ups and not procrastinate.