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The changing landscape of the data protection industry has evolved from primarily backing up data in order to recover from hardware, software, network failures and human errors, to fighting a mounting wave of cybercrime. Over the years, hardware and software have significantly improved their reliability and resiliency levels but security is a people problem, and people are committing the cybercrimes.

Cybercrime has now become the biggest threat to data protection and the stakes are getting higher as anonymous individuals seek to profit from other’s valuable digital data. With a cease-fire in the cybercrime war highly unlikely, we are witnessing a rapid convergence of data protection and cybersecurity to counter rapidly growing and costly cybercrime threats, including ransomware. The growing cybercrime wave has positioned air-gapped storage solutions as a key component of digital data protection – they simply can’t be hacked.

Traditional backup and archival data can be stored locally or in cloud environments. In contrast, a cyber-resilient copy of data must meet additional more stringent requirements. This is where “air gapping” and tape technology are gaining momentum. The rise of cybercrime officially makes the offline copy of data stored on tape more valuable and takes advantage of what is referred to as the tape air gap. The tape air gap is an electronically disconnected or isolated copy of data in a robotic library or tape rack that prevents cybercriminals from attacking a backup, archive or any other data.

Tape cartridges in a robotic tape library or manually accessed tape cartridges in tape racks, are currently the only data center class air-gapped storage solution available.

For more information, check out this Horison Information Strategies White Paper “The Tape Air Gap: Protecting Your Data From Cybercrime.”

The past decade saw the renaissance of data tape technology with dramatic improvements to capacity, reliability, performance, and TCO giving rise to new industry adoptions and functionality. This trend will only continue in 2021 as data storage and archival needs in the post-COVID digital economy demand exactly what tape has to offer. Below are 5 key contributions tape will make to the storage industry in 2021.

Containing the Growing Cost of Storage
One lingering effect of the pandemic will be the need for more cost containment in already budget-strapped IT operations. We are well into the “zettabyte age,” and storing more data with tighter budgets will be more important than ever. Businesses will need to take an intelligent and data-centric approach to storage to make sure the right data is in the right place at the right time. This will mean storage optimization and tiering where high capacity, low-cost tape plays a critical role — especially in active archive environments.

A Best Practice in Fighting Ransomware
One of many negative side effects of COVID-19 has been the increasing activity of ransomware attacks, not only in the healthcare industry which is most vulnerable at this time, but across many industries, everywhere.  Backup and DR vendors are no doubt adding sophisticated new anti-ransomware features to their software that can help mitigate the impact and expedite recovery. But as a last line of defense, removable tape media will increasingly provide air-gap protection in 2021, just in case the bad actors are one step ahead of the good guys.

Compatibility with Object Storage
Object storage is rapidly growing thanks to its S3 compatibility, scalability, relatively low cost and ease of search and access. But even object storage content eventually goes cold, so why keep that content on more expensive, energy-intensive HDD systems? This is where tape will play an increasing role in 2021, freeing up capacity on object storage systems by moving that content to a less expensive tape tier all while maintaining the native object format on tape.

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Modern tape storage has long been recognized for its low cost. Several analyst white papers have been published that demonstrate the low cost of storing data on tape. For example, “Quantifying the Economic Benefits of LTO-8 Technology” is a white paper that can be found on the LTO.org website. However, occasionally a storage solution provider publishes a white paper that claims to show that their solution is less expensive than tape storage for a particular use case. A good example is a recent white paper published by a disk-based backup-as-a-service provider who will remain unidentified out of respect for what they do. For the purpose of this blog, let’s call them “BaaS.” So let’s dig into their analysis which makes several assumptions that result in higher costs for tape storage than most users would experience.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Process

The first step in developing a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) estimate is the determination of the amount of data to be stored. The BaaS whitepaper separates the amount of primary data, which we wish to protect, from backup data, which is the data physically stored on the backup media. They estimate the amount of backup data residing in the tape library to be two to four times the primary data. This is due to their use of the old daily/ weekly/monthly/ full backup methodology for estimating the amount of backup data. The result is that two to four times the amount of primary data ends up being stored on tape, raising the tape hardware and media costs by two to four times.

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Ransomware statistics can be frightening! Research studies suggest that over two million ransomware incidents occurred in 2019 with 60% of organizations surveyed experiencing a ransomware attack in the past year. To make matters worse, the cybercriminals have moved up the food chain. Two thirds of those attacked said the incident cost them $100,000 to $500,000. Another 20% said the price tag exceeded half a million. Overall, the losses are measured in billions of dollars per year. And it’s getting worse. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reports that about half of all organizations have seen a rise in cyber attacks since the recent upsurge in people working from home.

Understandably, this is a big concern to the FBI. It has issued alerts about the dangers of ransomware. One of its primary recommendations to CEOs is the importance of backup with the following key questions:

“Do you backup all critical information? Are backups stored offline? Have you tested your ability to revert to backups during an incident?”

The key word in that line of questioning is “offline.” Hackers have gotten good at staging their attacks slowly over time. They infiltrate a system, quietly ensuring that backups are infected as well as operational systems. When ready, they encrypt the files and announce to the company that they are locked out of their files until the ransom is paid. Any attempt to recover data from disk or the cloud fails as the backup files are infected, too.

The answer is to make tape part of the 3-2-1 system: Three separate copies of data, stored on at least two different storage media with one copy off-site. This might mean, for example, one copy retained on onsite disk, another in the cloud, and one on tape; or one on onsite disk, one on onsite tape as well as tape copies stored offsite.

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Part 3: THE VALUE OF TAPE RISES RAPIDLY AS HYPERSCALE DATA CENTERS GROW

In Part 2 of this series, we looked at some of the key characteristics of hyperscale data centers. Now, we’ll explore how tape plays a role.

Today HSDCs are leveraging the many advantages of tape technology solutions to manage massive data growth and long-term retention challenges. Keep in mind most digital data doesn’t need to be immediately accessible and can optimally and indefinitely reside on tape subsystems. Some data requires secure, long-term storage solutions for regulatory reasons or due to the potential value that the data can provide through content analysis at a later date. Advanced tape architectures allow HSDCs to achieve business objectives by providing data protection for critical assets, backup, recovery, archive, easy capacity scaling, the lowest TCO, highest reliability, the fastest throughput, and cybersecurity protection via the air gap. These benefits are expected to increase for tape in the future.

Fighting the cybercrime epidemic has become a major problem for most data centers and HSDCs are no exception. Tape can play a key role in its prevention and provides WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) and encryption capabilities providing a secure storage medium for compliance, legal and any valuable files. Tape, as an “Air Gap” solution, has gained momentum providing an electronically disconnected copy of data that prevents cybercrime disasters from attacking data stored on tape. Disk systems remaining online 7×24 are the primary target as they are always vulnerable to a cybercrime attack.

HSDCs are taking advantage of tiered storage by integrating high-performance SSDs, HDD arrays and automated tape libraries. Even though HSDCs are struggling with the exploding growth of disk farms which are devouring IT budgets and overcrowding data centers, many continue to maintain expensive disks often half full of data which often has little or no activity for several years. Obviously, few data centers can afford to sustain this degree of inefficiency. The greatest benefits of tiered storage are achieved when tape is used as its scalability, lower price and lower TCO plays an increasing role as the size of the storage environment increases. For the hyperscale world “adding disk is tactical – adding tape is strategic.”

For more information on this topic, check out our white paper: The Ascent to Hyperscale.

By Kevin Benitez

Data is quickly becoming a critical asset to more and more companies, and now those companies are looking for ways to store massive amounts of data for long periods of time at a low cost for digital preservation or archiving.

Today, large amounts of archived data are being stored in object storage at an ever-increasing rate, both on-premise and in remote data centers such as the cloud.  Object storage has been particularly attractive for storing large amounts of digital information because of its flat architecture and easy access to metadata that allows for easy indexing, finding, and using of digital content. Additionally, object stores can scale to hundreds of petabytes in a single namespace without any performance degradation.

With those needs in mind, Fujifilm has developed the FUJIFILM Object Archive, which allows object storage to be written and read to and from data tape instead of mainstream HDDs, thereby significantly reducing costs. FUJIFILM Object Archive uses OTFormat to leverage object storage and modern tape. The software uses an industry-standard S3-compatible API so that on-premises object storage can be used at a lower cost while maintaining the same operability as cloud storage.

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April 29, 2020

Ransomware continues to threaten the security of enterprise IT infrastructures. In this Fujifilm Summit video, storage analyst George Crump talks to IBM’s Chris Bontempo about how artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping improve cybersecurity by identifying and stopping potential threats.

Watch the video here:

Rich Gadomski
Vice President of Marketing
FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc

I recently returned from a speaking opportunity at the PRISM Conference held in Miami on May 8^thand 9^th where I spoke on the Role of Tape in Today’s Modern Offsite Storage Center. In addition to holding and protecting valuable data tape cartridges for archive, backup, and disaster recovery applications, offsite vaults also play a crucial role in providing an “air gap” against cyber criminals and their alarming malware and ransomware variants. Because of tape’s powerful value proposition, it provides this functionality particularly well. It’s easily portable, has the lowest total cost of ownership, is the most reliable storage medium today, and has long archival life and high capacity.

The audience, which included many regional data vault service providers from the U.S. and abroad, didn’t have to take my word on the value prop of tape. I backed it up with studies from leading IT research companies and articles from reliable publications such as the Wall Street Journal. I sprinkled in some news about tape usage from folks like Microsoft Azure. Finally, I detailed the bright future tape has based on its ability to continue to increase in areal density which will ensure increasing capacity and cost competitiveness without sacrificing performance, thanks in part to Fujifilm’s Barium Ferrite and Strontium Ferrite magnetic particle technology.

At the end of my presentation, during the Q&A, I got the following response and question: “Tape sounds great, how come we don’t see more tape volume flowing into our vaults?” One reason for this would be the increasing data densities of tape which would reduce unit volumes. Understandably this is not great for the vault service providers, but this is actually a great benefit for end users; they can store more data on fewer units. Another factor to consider is the ever-increasing popularity of cloud storage over say, the past five years. We have seen a move from on-premises, do-it-yourself storage to outsourced cloud services. This is especially true among startups and SMBs and specific verticals where the cloud can provide unique functionality such as compute and file sharing.

But as the world turns ever so slowly, so do market conditions. Now that data storage pros have gotten comfortable with what the cloud can do, they are also starting to understand some of the downsides such as high TCO associated with egress fees and bandwidth. Security concerns might be mounting too in light of escalating cybersecurity breaches.

So at some point, tape will make sense again for many of the folks who tried cloud, considering TCO, budget constraints and the need for air gap. It’s just a matter of time, as long as demand for storage keeps rising based on relentless data growth.  And so long as the hackers don’t quit on the highly profitable multi-trillion dollar business of cybercrime.

According to Juniper Research, cybercrime is expected to become a $2.1 trillion problem by 2019. Using tape-based, offline storage creates an “air gap” that can prevent hackers from accessing your data. In this video, Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies, explains the benefits of tape storage for data security.