Category: data protection

Originally published on 1/8/18 at Forbes. Hacking is no longer new. It’s become a daily conversation in newsrooms and boardrooms everywhere; hacking and data breaches are the never-ending security story of the 21st century. Hackers illegally make their way into the computer systems of companies, hospitals, government institutions and our homes on a daily basis. […]

Hacking is in the news nearly every day and people constantly reach out to ask me if their information is safe. Are they at risk? What can they do to be more protected? Should they get a VPN or use Tor?

The best thing to do is to start simply. Begin with your passwords. Do you have good passwords on your accounts?

Ever look for a friend or colleague on LinkedIn only to find that he as two separate profiles that are each his? He’s got one profile that’s current and an older one from when he had a different job. Ever wonder why he did that?

I’ll tell you why. He didn’t do it on purpose, he did it because he’s short-sighted, forgetful, and doesn’t understand data.

Tape Library

All seemed well with backup operations at my company, until I got a visit from an operations center engineer. The lock already hanging open, he was holding one of the “secure” transports that our off-site tape storage vendor uses to move backup tapes. But this time, the tapes inside were not ours—someone else’s data was in our hands. I couldn’t help but think: how many times have our tapes been sent into our competitors’ hands? Did they send them back immediately as I did—or did they land in less scrupulous places? In this article, I’m going to show you how systemic thinking helps identify security vulnerabilities like this one in your company’s data backup systems, particularly related to issues around backup tapes.

You will learn:
– Factors to consider before you move to a tapeless data backup system
– Encryption challenges and opportunities-related to keeping your off-site data secure
– Approaches for backup tape reduction and legacy storage technology elimination

Backup and documentation are together the most-often neglected facets of IT operational management. Why? Backups usually don’t contribute directly to revenue generation. But this is a fatal mistake: ignoring backup and documentation can cost a corporation millions of dollars, even in typical litigation or disaster recovery scenarios.