Storage Cat 08 3/10/08 17:13 Page 58
58 SMARTER SECURITY
DATA PROTECTION SERVICES VS.
DIY PROTECTION PRODUCTS
Mike Rickards examines why businesses should be adopting
smarter secure security processes
Words: By Mike Rickards, Managing Director, Smartways
There is no doubt businesses are facing a confluence of reach 1.6TB.
challenges in relation to secure and robust data security Nevertheless, tape is often seen as a less reliable medium.
processes as news hits us on a daily basis of varying To store such a vast amount of important data on such a
organisations adopting new methods or breaches in security. system could be tantamount to career suicide for the
Online Data Protection, like many IT products and services, professional IT manager who later can’t recover what could be
became an acceptable method of delivering automated and the businesses entire data.
secure data backup in the USA, long before it became an Therefore, as business data becomes more critical and
acceptable method of backup in the UK and Europe. Yet one staff time more expensive, IT people and company Financial
of the principal reasons for this was the poor roll-out and Officers need to explore avenues to reduce costs, lessen risk
acceptance of Broadband (ADSL/SDSL) as a business level to the business and improve the overall security of their data
service, for without good connectivity, most on-line backup and this is where products like TouchPoint, the Online Backup
products simply don’t work very well, unless, they have always and Disaster Recovery tools from Smartways, fit the
been designed to work across the WAN. business requirements.
As on-line backup products evolve along with increased However, outsourcing is still often looked at as being more
bandwidth, DIY products such as backup software and tape expensive because there is additional cash expenditure
systems will eventually become obsolete. Magnetic tape has involved (on top of the normal overheads) whereas DIY just
been with us as a recording medium since the early 50’s and means a bit more effort and a hope that the data will be
then adapted for use as a data storage medium in the 1960’s; recoverable when it’s next needed.
so in a sense, its probably one of the oldest ‘memory’ In spite of this, Online Backup is really taking off within the
technologies in use. The technology is extremely cumbersome UK. By reducing the amount of data being stored offline
and enormous when compared to “spinning disc” technologies through Data De-duplication and compression, what started
and with the advent of 1TB SATA Hard Disc for example, a off as 100GB of data to be stored off-line can often be
letter such as the letter ‘I’ can be stored in a single byte of reduced to 50GB. Data is also far more secure because (in
storage – this means that a 1 TB disc can store the case of TouchPoint) there is a local copy ready for fast
1,099,511,627,776 (A trillion letters) – a vast amount of data. restoration, plus a copy of all generations of data at the
However, in comparison, tape is certainly not letting itself Backup providers Data Centre where they will have replicated
down as a technology and is certainly putting up a strong this again for their own business continuity purposes.
fight where long-term storage is required for archiving. Thus, there is still space for Tape. Eventually the good
Indeed, the latest LTO4 tapes can store a raw data capacity times will come to an end and a faster, greener, trendier and
of 800GB and if the data is compressible, that could even less complicated technology will takeover.
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