After have spent the majority of my career in developing, selling, and supporting tape backup drives, subsystems and software, I’ve got a pretty good appreciation for how many steps there are in the tape backup process. Assuming the backup is successful, the tapes to be stored off-site are brought from the onsite unit to the courier, from the courier to the off-site location, and then to their final place inside that off-site location.
That’s three steps after the backup that you don’t control. And it’s in that sequence of steps, that chain of custody, that things can go terribly wrong.
I came across an article in the Boston Globe about a local hospital that lost the sensitive and confidential information of 800,000 people somewhere in that chain of custody. In between the hospital and the off-site data destruction company (this hospital was deleting the records), the tapes got lost.
Why even take that risk nowadays? Stepping into the 21st century and adopting an online backup and recovery system eliminates that entire chain of custody. The only step with today’s online technology is to send your encrypted data from your laptops, desktops and servers to a secure data center over your internet connection.
Unfortunately, there is now financial, medical and personal information for nearly a million people from that local hospital’s tape media now floating out there in the ether somewhere, and it could all be prevented by removing that chain entirely.
Tom Gelson, CEO of Nine Technology
tgelson@ninetechnology.com
