Blog

By Peter Faulhaber

May 7, 2020

I’ve become accustomed to odd looks and lots of questions when I meet new people and tell them I’m in the data tape business. “Really? Tape? In 2020?” is a common response.

I can forgive some people — those who last touched a consumer VHS tape or audiocassette in the late 90s or early 2000s. I’ve come to really enjoy expanding their perspective, though, when I tell them that tape is a major workhorse in “the cloud” and that most of the household-name technology and internet companies are tape users. Business continuity, including several data protection applications is a big part of the reason why, along with tape’s low total cost of ownership and low energy consumption. I think we can all agree that economics and preserving the environment is key to continuity in its own right!

Information is Currency in the Zettabye Age
The worldwide datasphere is currently around 35 Zettabytes (that’s 35 billion Terabytes) and expected to be 175 ZB by 2025 — an estimated annual compound growth rate of 30%.  The odds are good you’re seeing a similar rate of data explosion in your own business. Everything today is born digital, not just “structured” data like databases but “unstructured” data such as spreadsheets, documents, presentations, video, audio and photographs. Add to that the appliances and devices in the “Internet of Things” — smart vehicles, smart planes, smart phones, smart homes, factories and cities. Then add to the mix artificial intelligence, machine learning, ecommerce, email, social media, gaming, surveillance, VR, mobile and more – you can see the path we’re on.

We keep all this data around for years and sometimes decades because it is potentially valuable enough to justify archiving or keeping online in an active archive.  Whether your business relies on archival video footage or photos, harvests data for sale to outside parties or uses information for internal streamlining, strategy, or planning, it’s become impossible to even imagine a modern business without data that is increasing in value.

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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.