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World Backup Day

CMMA Blog

Today is World Backup Day and we are celebrating and gently reminding IT organizations across the world, backup your data! Though we celebrate it once a year, it does not mean we backup data once a year. Let’s consider 3 reasons why backing up to protect your data is crucial to your organization: 

The Rising Tide of Data 

Managing data is becoming a challenge for many IT organizations. The continued rising volumes of data is putting pressure on backup strategies that were once effective. IT leaders need to find the latest, fastest, most cost-effective forms of backup solutions that can make sizeable backups manageable and easy to implement. IDC projects that there will be 79.4ZB of data created by connected IoT devices by 2025, growing from 13.6ZB. Unstructured content related to entertainment (creation, production, distribution and consumer consumption) continues to be the largest category of data.” This volume of data presents many challenges so backup methodologies and strategies need to be revisited often. Finding the right backup tools and methodology are an essential piece to finding the right recipe for your organization as is preparing your infrastructure for the vast amount of data that is being generated. 

Back Up Regularly to Avoid Disaster 

Why do you need to backup anyway? Because you never know. Infrastructure hardware will fail. Malware, such as ransomware will strike, and humans will make errors. There is no question IT Managers must be prepared for those moments when disaster strikes a blow when you least expect. Backing up your data regularly will ensure you can protect and recover data quickly and effectively. In addition, they should be done intelligently to address the hyper-growth and the requirement for hyper-availability. Part of finding the right solution requires an analysis to help determine the value of data to efficiently manage greater volumes that applications are generating. It is a necessity not a luxury to future-proof your infrastructure.  This exercise helps organizations acquire the correct tier of technology to not only manage but restore within the specified SLAs of the organization. 

Ransomware 

Highlighting ransomware is important because of its prevalence in cyberspace. Threats and attacks are getting more aggressive and those ransomware-focused threat actors are using creative means to break into systems and deploy ransomware for the threat actor’s payday (Source: TechCrunch). There is a rule as old as time that has been proven true time and time again:

Keep 3 copies of your data, using 2 different storage media types (object, flash, HDD, tape) 1 offsite (physically separate from the building such as DR site), and 1 offline (completely disconnected from your network).

Keeping a clearly defined data copy offline and air-gapped to protect against malware attack will enable you to retrieve that data and get back up to speed faster and back to business sooner in the case where your network-connected copies are compromised. 

Conclusion 

World Backup Day is not about backing up just one day of the year. Let today serve as an awareness day to remind enterprises and SMB’s that protecting data by backing it up regularly will prevent disasters that can come in any form. Restoring data from a backup copy will allow businesses to resume operations effectively. There is value in protecting your data. What is the value? In many cases, unquantified. Preserve and protecting your data, whether for the three factors mentioned or to simply provide the continuity of business operations. Learn more about our Enterprise Backup and Archive solutions .

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Air-Gap: A Cybersecurity Benefit

Archive

Of course, magnetic tape is an old technology but the simple reason of being old does not make it ineffective or impractical to use in the modern data center. Many would dare to say, magnetic tape is so retro its totally new again. I am inclined to believe that. Why? For one, the most modern data centers, called hyper-scalers, are leveraging the use of magnetic tape and cost-efficiency for such large magnitudes of data. For the rest of us, it mainly has to do with the cybersecurity benefit of air-gapping a backup copy.

I recently did a webinar where I teamed up with one of Quantum’s IT managers to discuss mainly what his IT organization did to protect against Ransomware. (If you missed, see here: Ransomware Webinar ).  Maybe for some it felt like it was a pitch for tape coming from a company that owns more than 30% of the tape market, but the reality is that we have seen and heard from many companies how air-gapping a backup copy truly became the best last line of defense against the nemesis of Ransomware. Plus, if we didn’t use the solution ourselves, would you really buy it from us?

When your organization was saved multiple millions of dollars because you stored a backup copy of your asset or last week’s data on tape and saved the most precious intangible commodity of time, creativity and effort plus the tangible ones like new data of new customer acquisitions, market intelligence and new product analysis you too would also say, damn tape is freakin’ awesome. Ransomware, due to the patience and tenacity of the criminals behind it, can sit and pause for any length of time inspecting your network from a distance until they discover a way to bypass your security. This is not to say, that the cybersecurity software in the market today aren’t amazing solutions, but if we’ve learned something it is that cyber-criminals are tenaciously patient and very hungry to be rewarded. This is why, air-gap is the best last line of defense. Working together with cybersecurity software, SDDs, flash and replication technology as data moves from a hot to cold status, air-gapping becomes very cost-effective and the best way to store long-term data.  In no way, are we saying replace your ultra-speeds that SSDs or flash offer in a back-up scenario, but rather include an air-gap backup copy on magnetic tape in the event you find your network connected devices compromised by ransomware. The enterprise backup environment is being hit hard by these vile characters and you don’t want to be caught by surprise.

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Rollerblades, Grocery Carts, and Ransomware

Archive Storage

Even if you haven’t been bitten by ransomware, I bet you know someone who has.  It’s an increasing problem for organizations as well.  Thankfully more and more are waking up to the fact that the best defense is a copy of data that’s “air-gapped” – not attached to any network.  One of the most cost-effective and safest ways to create an air-gapped copy of data is to put it on tape in a vault.

The great thing about a tape on a shelf in a secure location is there is absolutely no way that it can be accessed by a remote attacker.  But that doesn’t mean this method is necessarily easy or perfect.

Let me tell you a story.

Back in the early aughts, I was a pre-sales engineer for a little tape company called Advanced Digital Information Corp – ADIC – who later merged with Quantum.  I went to visit a company that had called us because their backups were suffering.  They could back data up, mostly, but had lots of media problems.  The problems extended to restores too, which was really bad.  In short, their system was unreliable, and they were desperate.

As we walked to the conference room, we passed a glass wall looking into the data center.  What I saw through that window froze me in my tracks.  This was a good-sized data center, with a few dozen rows of racks.  Each server – had to be hundreds of them – had its own DLT tape drive for nightly backups.  But it wasn’t just the fact that these guys hadn’t heard of automated tape libraries that horrified me.

There was an operator, wearing rollerblades, hurriedly pushing a wire grocery cart down the aisles.  He’d stop at each rack, yank the eject handle on every tape drive, grab the tapes (sometimes dropping them), and throw them into the grocery cart.  Sometimes he’d miss, and a tape would bounce off the cart and land on the floor.

I bet you can guess why the backups were unreliable.  Data tapes are reasonably tough, but they are precision mechanical devices.  If you toss them around like your Dad’s Led Zeppelin cassettes, you will have problems.  I did some education that day, and they eventually bought a robotic tape library from us.  Their backups reverted to the normal level of unreliability that we all experienced with DLT, and the operator got to retire his rollerblades.  Everyone was happy.

The point of this story is that the biggest problem with vaulting tapes is humans.  Humans lose tapes, misfile tapes, drop tapes, and just generally cause problems.  Humans are also expensive and paying them to shuffle boxes of tapes from one place to another is a waste.  You can pay for more slots and leave all your tapes in a robotic tape library, but then they aren’t offline, so they are exposed to ransomware risk.

Or are they?

Quantum has uniquely solved this problem in our Scalar tape libraries , with an optional feature called Active Vault.  Active Vault creates a secure, in-library vault for tapes using unlicensed slots.  It uses a dedicated partition in the library that has no tape drives and is totally isolated from external applications.  With Active Vault, when tapes are exported the robot moves them into the Active Vault partition, instead of the import/export door.  For the application to access them again, an operator must first log into the library remote GUI and move the tapes back from the Active Vault partition into the application partition.  But he doesn’t have to leave his chair.

But wait, there’s more…

Next to those pesky humans, use and time are the next biggest enemies of tape media.  With enough use and time tapes wear out.  This is something you don’t want to learn when you suddenly can’t read one.  In the Scalar i6 and i6000 libraries, you can have tapes in the Active Vault scanned periodically to ensure they are readable, and you will be alerted if one is getting sketchy before you lose data.  Try that with tapes on a dusty closet shelf!

Be nice to your tapes and they will be nice to you.  Let the robot handle them, and use Active Vault to lock a copy of your data away where ransomware can’t find it.

To view our Partner blog, click here