Category: eDiscovery

There seems to be confusion in corporate America about whether or not to delete data. On one hand, there are legal departments that advise keeping everything forever, and on the other are those that recommend deleting everything as a matter of policy as soon as possible — whacking away at files and folders on your file servers like a drunk landscaper whirling a weed whacker around your yard. Meanwhile, IT is stuck in the middle trying to develop and engineer systems to enforce ever-changing data retention policies. 

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.

It’s the countdown to the Data 2.0 Conference, Monday, April 4, 2011, at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.  I’ll be there moderating several panels on data storage management, data2.0 and legal implications as well as augmented business intelligence.  I hope that you can join us to discover how the online data revolution […]