Category: storage

To Delete Or Not To Delete — That Is The Question

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

Are your backup systems secure?

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.

Big Data Under Attack

Once again, everybody is talking about China. On Feb. 19, Mandiant, an American security company issued a startling report — the result of a six-year investigation — that makes the claim that the United Sates is in a cyber war with a 12-story building in Shanghai. The private security analyst concluded that the building is home of China’s stealth cyber war division, the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398.

If this sounds like the movie, War Games, make no mistake – this is real. According to Mandiant, for the last seven years, Chinese hackers have stolen data from at least 141 companies across 20 major industries, including critical infrastructure sectors like energy and telecommunications. At least 115 of the companies were in the United States. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said classified intelligence documents support Mandiant’s claim.

Last year, we proclaimed this the Era of Big Data, and, in light of the dramatic events of the last few weeks, we thought it was an appropriate time to consider what’s happened since. In order to understand this from the inside, we invited a leading big data expert, Brian Greenberg, VP of Technology Operations at Total Attorneys and Founder of General System Dynamics, to help us parse fact from fiction or fantasy.

Why you should stop write protecting your backup tapes.

Want to know how to save yourself a lot of money and grief? Stop write protecting your backup tapes. I recently had a conversation with a friend who’s the data center manager of a large company with a $25 Billion dollar market cap. He shared a story with me to vent his frustration. There was, […]

Are your data backup systems secure?

My most recent article “Are your Backup Systems Secure?” has been published at the InfoSec Institute’s InfoSec Resources site. In this article, I approach data security and the integrity of data backup systems from a whole systems perspective. I show you how you can, in your own systems, look at different vectors of data storage […]