It's a data-intensive world: protect your data with tape.

In an Internet Security Threat Report, Symantec Corporation reports that one-sixth of enterprises surveyed claimed a significant data security breach in the first half of 2003, while fully 50% reported a serious breach in the second half of 2003. In August 2003, millions of computers worldwide were infected by the Sobig.F, Blaster and Welchia worms. As published in Computer Economics, the direct economic impact of these attacks was at least $2 billion, not including the costs associated with lost customer confidence, reduced stock valuations and negative publicity.

Mother Nature can be as devastating to the health and survival of a business as any man-made threat. Whether it be fires, mudslides and earthquakes in California, tornadoes of the central plains, hurricanes in the southeast, power grid problems in the northeast, or similar problems throughout the world, the devastation often extends to businesses--affecting jobs, services and production.

For example, in May 2001, a huge fire in Taipei, Taiwan, raged for 43 hours and completely destroyed the offices of 53 companies, most of them in the high-tech industry. The major electronics manufacturers were able to resume operations immediately by shifting affected workers to other offices and implementing well-executed, tape-based, backup and disaster recovery processes to restore critical data. Other companies were not so lucky: one tech-savvy engineering company that handled design work for Taiwan's high-speed rail system lost every bit of data they had collected over 27 years. They thought that just storing survey and engineering data on their storage server with one local backup copy was sufficient to protect them from disaster.

Many companies, organizations and government agencies make excellent use of tape storage and have processes in place to protect their data. However, even the best backup schemes may not be appropriate if they reside in-house only and, therefore, being able to move tape cartridges to an offsite facility is a necessity.

The recent discussions on Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) state that all data is not created equal, and therefore does not require equal treatment for backup and disaster recovery purposes. There are four categories of data value, each requiring its own backup and disaster recovery service level that a company should consider:

Level 1: Critically important. Instant recovery needed to prevent significant revenue loss. "We need that system back-up right now!"

Level 2: Operationally important: Recovery needed within a few hours. "Please get that to me by the end of the day."

Level 3: Reference/Organizationally important: Recovery within 24-48 hours is acceptable. "We can live without it for now, but we'll need it soon."

Level 4: Historically important: Timely recovery is not important, but long-term retention is required for audit and regulatory compliance purposes. "You better get that data back before someone finds out that it's missing."

Level 1: Critical Data. In some industries, such as financial services, an hour of downtime can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue. Inventory and production data stored in Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems can also be considered critical if loss of this data causes a severe factory shutdown. Protecting the MRP systems and data that support critical applications requires mirroring of servers and data stores, both locally and remotely to be able to recover from differing levels of service outage. But mirroring does not protect the organization from inadvertent or malicious data loss: If a virus wipes out a critical database, the mirrored copy will also be immediately destroyed. So creating point-in-time backup copies of critical data is required to be able to retrieve deleted or corrupted information. For critical data, using data storage tape is a highly reliable and secure way to retain multiple backup data sets from a range of time, since viruses or corrupted database files may exist in the system for some period before being recognized. Using inexpensive, high-capacity tape allows organizations to maintain as many versions of backup data as they require. And since tapes are removable and portable from the system, they also facilitate moving backup data to off-site storage vaults for the most reliable disaster recovery protection available.

Level 2: Operational Data. Most of the active data running around networks is important to getting jobs done, and losing access to any of this data certainly affects the efficiency of the organization, but not to the extent that the long-term health or financial performance of the business would be affected. Engineering and design databases for existing products may be considered operational data, as are records of current accounting transactions. Some organizations are at risk if they don't include tape as part of their overall storage solution for operationally important data and provide long-term protection.

Level 3: Reference Data. Organizational documents and records that describe how a business operates (such as procedure manuals and employee files) plus sales, marketing and engineering materials, can be grouped here. The organization will survive just fine if access to this type of data is restricted for a day or two. That's not to say that the business can afford to lose any of it; it would need to be recreated at potentially significant expense. So performing regular tape backups is necessary to retain active reference data, and using tape as the backup medium is the most cost-effective way to meet this requirement.

Level 4: Historical Data. As an organization matures, it can collect an enormous amount of data in the form of legal and financial records, employee records, product designs and testing reports, and external communications. This information may be rarely needed to conduct the day-to-day operations of the business, but still the organization is required to retain it to comply with applicable government regulations and other mandates. Keeping this data in active systems creates a huge performance and management burden on those systems, and can affect the overall performance of the organization. The best solution is to move this data, or archive it, to tape. At least two copies should be made and stored in geographically different locations to eliminate the threat of data loss from a disaster. Many companies maintain one copy of archived data in their data center, in scalable automated tape libraries, to allow fast access to this data when it's needed and eliminate the need to go to the off-site vault to search for it. When it isn't being accessed, the on-site tape archive library is not putting any load on the company's network, nor is it drawing much electricity. As more data capacity is required, additional tape cartridges are added. Archiving historical data (which can account for as much as 80% of a company's total data) should provide a significant cost and performance benefit to the IT department.

It is a data-intensive world that we live in, and that is not likely to change in the near future. Organizations of all types and sizes have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to protect their most precious assets: their employees and their data. However, the cost of these protective measures should not cause a business to become financially unviable; otherwise, those who have terrorized us with bombs and viruses will be able to claim victory over us. Categorizing data assets, and applying the most cost-effective methods to protect each category, will help to ensure that the organization will continue to provide the products, services and employment opportunities that make its survival important to us all. Any solution that forgoes tape entirely puts data at undue risk. At the end of the day, the only way to be totally secure is to protect your company's data assets.

www.tapecouncil.org

Rich Harada is president of the Tape Technology Council (Hillsdale, NJ)