In yet another illustration of the dangers of transporting tapes off-site, over 2 million medical records (including Social Security numbers) were stolen from the University of Miami. The theft appears to be random as the tapes were stolen from a van transporting them to an off-site location and the data (encrypted and compressed) does not appear to be vulnerable. Still, this sort of theft is a concern to anyone transporting data to an off-site location.
The University of Miami has temporarily suspended their disaster recovery efforts to investigate other off-site options, but with the Act of God frequency pretty high down there, they will be wanting a solution soon. It will be intersting to see which way they head.
3 comments ↓
Is there any other option besides online? I dont think so. Let me know if I am missing something here. They are in a region prone to natural disaster so they gotta send the data elsewhere.
fred
http://www.backupanytime.com/whitepaper.htm
Other than online or some sort of site-to-site transfer, there really isn’t another good option. As you say, they definitely have to get their data to another location somehow.
Unfortunately, if they are dealing with a huge amount of daily data, online backup might not be practical. Upload times may be too long and as for recovery . . . how long does it take to pull down a terabyte of data?
Tapes seem to remain a necessary evil for some organizations, but I feel that pointing to the risks involved in their use might hasten a solution.
Why does this keep happening? There is a defined eCulture called The Business-Technology Weave that helps to influence employee behaviour as regards security, use and integrity of data. This is particularly relevant: http://www.businessforum.com/DScott_02.html . Some good stuff here too: http://www.david-scott.net . We use this book, “I.T. Wars”, at work - I wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t making a tremendous difference. The CEO on down has read it.
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