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Tape Storage 2011 in Review

Michael Kramer — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:45:00 -0500

As we near the end of the calendar year, the time seems right for a look back at the biggest stories in 2011 related to tape storage. I’ve covered a lot of ground in this blog over the past year—clearly, there’s been a lot to talk about. Here are some of the key themes in 2011 related to storing data on tape.

Tape doesn’t suck—and it’s making a comeback. Contrary to what the tape-bashers out there would have you believe, businesses continued to find tape to be a robust, cost-effective, green, reliable way to store data in 2011. The majority of businesses reported still using tape storage for onsite backups, as well as for offsite backups and disaster recovery. Experts at the Tape Summit in May went so far as to proclaim a tape renaissance, as businesses increasingly turned to tape to cost-effectively deal with the data explosion and the compliance and legal need to keep more data for longer.

Tape keeps evolving. In June, the LTO Consortium announced the availability of licenses for its still-under-development LTO Ultrium Generation 6 tape format. With this next generation of tape, industry leaders HP, IBM and Quantum are proving their commitment to continuing to invest in making tape better and faster—a sign of ongoing life for tape as a storage medium.

Data keeps getting bigger. The volume of data continued to grow at a blistering pace in 2011, by some accounts on pace to double every 14 months or so. This so-called “Big Data” phenomenon continued to bring both good news and bad news in 2011. The good news: businesses have tons of data at their fingertips, which they can use as an asset if they play their cards right. The bad news: so much data, much of it inactive, can be difficult and costly to store and manage.

Active archiving is on the rise. The words “active archive” seemed to be on everyone’s lips in the storage industry in 2011. Put a convenient file system front end on a tape library, and what do you get? A solution to managing the rapidly exploding data universe, 60 to 90 percent of which is inactive. An active archive can make data readily accessible without the cost and hassle of storing every kilobyte online. Companies increasingly turned to active archiving as a way to store only the most frequently accessed data on disk and the rest on low-cost, easy-to-manage tape.

Cloud adoption rises, while questions still abound. Companies continued to incorporate the cloud as part of their enterprise storage strategies. Questions remained about security, compliance and reliability in the cloud, as well as whether cloud storage and tape storage could coexist. (They can.)

Mobile adds complexity. Growth in mobile computing, particularly in tablet PCs, challenged IT managers to walk a fine line between enabling the business (read: accommodating those demands from the C-suite) and protecting data. Smart policy and storage decisions were the first steps toward successfully navigating this challenge.

Compliance keeps getting tougher. No matter what your industry, compliance requirements seemed to become tougher than ever in 2011. From eDiscovery compliance becoming more difficult, to the new HIPAA audit program, to the Volcker Rule that will affect financial services firms, more stringent requirements seemed to appear everywhere you looked, bringing with them more challenging data management requirements.

What other top tape storage stories crossed your radar screen in 2011? And what do you think 2012 will bring for the tape storage industry? I’ll be sharing my own predictions in an upcoming post and I’d love your input.

Your Next Big Career Move: Data Management?

Michael Kramer — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:31:40 -0500

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When you think about what might lead to the next step forward in your career, data management might not be at the top of your list—but maybe it should be. That’s the conclusion I came to earlier this week on reading “5 Hot Tech Projects to Boost Your IT Career” on CIO.com.

The article highlights the five projects that the author believes “will make you a hero to upper management while enabling the organization to move forward.” And, while these projects aren’t all data management projects in name, it struck me that data management and storage are key components of all of these hot projects. Take a look:

Streamline your company’s data: The article focuses on the importance not only of getting a handle on big data at the macro level, but also on developing the agility to isolate subsets of actionable data to allow the business to make critical decisions. My add: The foundation of success here is to manage big data in a way that enables the organization to find and use it, as well as store it all economically, reliably and securely.
Master your mobile devices: Success in this area depends on balancing user demands (often those of the senior execs who hold your career fate in their hands) with the importance of data protection. My advice: You need a mobile device usage policy, a mobile device management strategy and a secure and economical way to store the added data volume.
Become a devops shop: This project is about seamless collaboration between your development capability and operations—which, according to the article, requires a culture change. Again, it comes down to data. IT needs to better understand how the business will use the data in order to develop applications and infrastructure that best support the organization’s goals.
Create a crisis response team: The author focuses here on general disaster response/business continuity planning, and data backup and recovery obviously have an essential role here too. This is one project that might not necessarily boost your career prospects if you do it right, but can quickly sink you if you miss the boat.
Gain control over social media: In addition to the need the author cites to develop and enforce social media use policies, success also requires organizations to efficiently capture, manage and store the huge volumes of data produced by social media—not to mention in a way that mitigates legal and compliance risks.

So, while at first blush, data management might not appear to be the strategic rocket fuel that will launch your IT career into the stratosphere, it certainly is one of the building blocks of success with these hot projects.

Are all of these projects on your short list? Which others do you see as career critical in the next 3-5 years?

3 Things to Consider When It Comes to Cloud Compliance

Michael Kramer — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:50:23 -0500

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Among the new challenges and unsolved mysteries presented by cloud storage, how to maintain compliance in a cloud environment is one of the most daunting for firms in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare. The regulatory issues and security concerns that these firms already are dealing with are “amplified” in the cloud, as one security expert recently put it. Security, this expert concluded, is still playing catch-up with the rapidly evolving cloud service model—no small consideration for organizations that must keep their data protected and secure or suffer the regulatory consequences.

Thinking of leveraging cloud data storage in a regulated industry? Here are three things to think about that can help keep you in compliance:

Manage the activities of those “shadow IT departments” within your organization—you know, the project team that decides to try out Google Docs, or the marketing department that opts for a new online collaboration tool. Years ago, storing data externally required a lengthy vendor selection and contracting process. Today, anyone in your organization can move data outside your organization in an instant by tapping into a cloud solution, unwittingly creating a compliance risk. Have a clear data storage policy that addresses cloud solutions, educate your people on it and enforce it.
Choose a provider with care. Clearly, you’ll want to be very thorough in your due diligence in selecting a cloud service provider. If you’ve done any thinking at all about storing data in the cloud, you’ve probably considered that performance, reliability, security, cost and other factors should play heavily into your vendor decision. You might also want to seek out a vendor specifically compliant with the relevant regulations—Amazon Web Services for PCI DSS compliance, for instance. (Keep in mind the vendor’s compliance doesn’t automatically make you compliant, though.

Also consider the existence of specialized cloud service providers whose sole purpose is to store data for one specific industry or another. These providers are well schooled in the practices and controls required to maintain compliance with industry-specific regulations. Bloomberg Vault, for example, stores messages for compliance demands for financial services firms, as well as offers real-time policy management searches and flags messages for compliance issues.
Segment your data and use a tiered storage model. Some data just isn’t destined for the cloud. Do you feel 100% confident that you know where the cloud service provider is physically storing all of your data, how many copies have been made, whether data has been changed, if it’s completely deleted when requested, or whether it ever leaves certain countries or jurisdictions? Some regulations require that you can confidently answer a long list of specific questions about how your data is being managed in the cloud. If you want to gain the efficiency benefits of the cloud while eliminating these uncertainties, consider segmenting out public and non-public data. Public data could be stored in the cloud, while nonpublic data, such as personal health records, that must be stored for the duration can be archived securely, reliably and affordably in house on tape.

Clearly, firms in regulated industries have a lot to think about when it comes to the cloud. Time will tell whether cloud security becomes robust enough to erase compliance concerns, but for now the smart money is on a tiered storage strategy that aims to store the right data sets on the right storage media.

Storage Tips from the Kings of Big Data

Michael Kramer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:45:00 -0400

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Big Data might be the next big thing in terms of helping companies better understand and meet customer needs, but it’s far from easy to manage. As organizations everywhere struggle with the challenges of storing huge files and creating long-term archives—all while making the data accessible—some of the companies dealing with the largest data stores (numbers like 450 billion database objects and 40 TB per week) recently shared their best practices in “Storage Tips From Heavy-Duty Users” on CIO.com.

Here are some of the tips offered by the Library of Congress, Amazon.com and Mazda, which might provide some thought-starters for how your own organization can better manage Big Data storage.

To keep scale under control, consider having infrastructure in a primary location that handles most of the data and a second location for long term archiving.
Contain costs by storing seldom accessed content offline and on tape.
Use parallelization to split files into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Manage file corruption diligently, as even a low failure rate can mean lots of errors to manage when data stores are so massive.
Use virtualization to reduce hardware costs, stop server sprawl and streamline disaster recovery.
Implement a tiered storage strategy, with inactive data quickly migrating to low-cost, reliable, secure, environmentally friendly tape.

What about Google, MasterCard, the federal government and other big data “kings” who are managing some of the most massive data stores in the universe? As these and other leaders continue to get their arms around Big Data, there might well be some lessons from their experience for those of us managing smaller—yet no less critical—Big Data stores.

How is your organization coping with Big Data storage? What have you learned along the way—on your own or from another organization—that had helped you in this challenge?

Don’t Let a Data Breach Kill Your Corporate Reputation

Michael Kramer — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:29:21 -0400

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Following a data breach, companies undoubtedly tally the financial impact in terms of the time and money it takes to respond to and recover from the breach—but do most organizations also quantify the impact on their corporate reputation or brand value? If yours doesn’t, it should. A recent survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Experian Data Breach Resolution tells us the reputational cost is far from chump change. According to the survey, the average loss in brand value as a result of a data breach ranges from $184 million to more than $330 million. This amount equated to somewhere between a 12 percent and a 25 percent loss of brand value. The survey also indicated that it takes an average of a full year to restore a company’s reputation following a breach.

Corporate reputation and brand value can seem like fuzzy, abstract concepts that are difficult to measure, but this survey reminds us that they have a decidedly concrete financial impact. The fact that public companies quantify their reputations as “goodwill” on their balance sheets also reminds us that the way our stakeholders view our organizations really is an asset to be valued and protected.

A positive reputation drives cold, hard business results, from making customers more likely to buy your products, to reducing your cost of capital and raising your share price. Goodwill builds over years and even decades, as customers, prospects, shareholders, regulators, the media, the community and other stakeholders learn to respect and trust your organization. And it can be destroyed in an instant by a data breach. One of the fastest ways to damage your reputation is to lose backup tapes or have to notify tens of thousands of customers that their sensitive data has been compromised due to inadequate security measures.

Keeping your reputation intact is a twofold effort:

Protect your data with an information security program that doesn’t cut corners and takes into account all possible types of threats. When it comes to data tape security, for example, we advise clients to follow basic tape management best practices, like encryption, backup testing and validation, and secure transfer procedures, as well as tape management solutions to track, move and protect media across all sources and platforms.
Plan for how you’ll handle a data breach, if and when it happens. Despite the most diligent efforts, data breaches still do happen. But don’t let poor handling of a breach harm your reputation more than the breach itself. Make sure your organization has a comprehensive data breach response plan for being, as Visa advises its merchants, accurate, fast, open, honest, transparent, accountable, and thorough in responding to and communicating about a breach.

Have you experienced the reputational buzzkill of a data breach? How did your organization recover its lost goodwill—or did it?

eDiscovery Compliance Just Got Harder – Are You Ready?

Michael Kramer — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:55:00 -0400

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I don't want to alarm you, but eDiscovery just got harder.

That’s the main message in the results of a recent survey that found that e-mails are no longer the most commonly requested documents in eDiscovery requests. Files and documents now top the list of types of data companies must produce to meet eDiscovery requests, followed by database or application data. Other sources include SharePoint files, instant messages, text messages and social media.

What’s so tough about other data sources rising up the list and surpassing e-mail? For a while now, companies have viewed eDiscovery as primarily an e-mail management game. Now, as the Symantec survey indicates, it’s not quite that simple anymore. Today’s eDiscovery challenge, as these results highlight: how to produce requested information from across a broader range of disparate data sources—but to do so just as quickly as ever to avoid sanctions, fines and compromising your legal position and driving up costs by providing too much information.

Picture your staff spending hours over many days, weeks or even months manually poring through file systems looking for the required documents, e-mails, IMs and Tweets. Strategic projects would fall by the wayside as your burned-out staff labored at this mundane task under the pressure of knowing that the company’s legal butt was on the line—and that their efforts could make or break the case. Is the pain of this imagined predicament enough to send eDiscovery preparedness shooting up on your priority list?

Surprisingly, many companies remain woefully unprepared for an eDiscovery request, especially one that would require the company to pinpoint data from among such diverse and disparate data sources. Nearly half of respondents don’t have an information retention plan, and 14 percent don’t even have a plan to develop a plan.

Facing this challenge starts with having the right information management strategies in place—and the technology to back them up. Among other best practices, companies looking to be prepared for today’s more diverse eDiscovery requests need to:

Implement an active, consistently enforced retention policy that covers all potential data sources, not just e-mail. The policy needs to specify not just what to keep and for how long, but how to systematically destroy data at the appropriate time.
Cast a wider ESI (electronically stored information) net. Determine how you will capture, manage, store, backup and archive data from each and every potentially discoverable source.
Deploy the right eDiscovery tools to defensibly collect and process data for review from these disparate sources.

Having the right eDiscovery strategy and tools can help you locate the right data (and only the right data) in a matter of minutes, rather than in days, weeks or not at all. As the survey report states, doing eDiscovery right can yield a 64 percent faster response time with a 2.3 times higher success rate. Especially in a large organization with frequent legal exposure, the case is closed on this one: Get your eDiscovery house in order, or prepare to face the consequences.

What is your companies policy concerning eDiscovery? Let us know your take in our comments section.

Data Loss Happens—It’s How You Recover that Matters

Michael Kramer — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:12:10 -0400

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More than half of the companies queried for the Cibecs 2011 Business Data Loss Survey have lost data already in 2011. And with a full quarter left in the year, that result has nowhere to go but up. As this survey highlights, the fact of the matter is that companies will continue to experience data crises. Hardware will continue to fail, humans will continue to err, natural disasters will inevitably strike, laptops and iPads will continue to go missing, viruses will keep attacking and users will fail to follow backup policies.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that we should just throw up our hands and wait for data to go missing. On the contrary, companies can and should limit their exposure to the risks of data loss through actions like keeping systems up to date, ensuring data integrity, enforcing and educating users on security and backup policies and more.

However, try as we might, we can’t eliminate the risk of data loss altogether. That’s where disaster recovery preparedness comes in. Having a fully tested disaster recovery plan is essential. And the foundation of that plan is data storage. Having a tiered data storage strategy that incorporates the right mix of storage media—from hosted cloud storage to offsite tape management solutions—can help ensure that your data is fully backed up and readily accessible for a restore when inevitably needed.

While storage can seem like a basic, mundane fact of IT life, in the end it’s largely your storage strategy that will determine whether and how quickly you can recover lost data. Not to mention how much it will cost to restore your data: The Cibecs study reports that the average cost of recovering from the loss or theft of a business laptop is $50,000. Sound steep? When you consider the indirect costs of data loss, like interrupted productivity and reputational damage, it starts to seem a little more realistic. The faster and easier your recovery, the bigger the bite you can take out of these costs as well.

DR planning and a well-thought-out storage strategy can help minimize the risks and consequences of unavoidable data loss. If the numbers from this study are any indication, the business world has a lot to gain by investing the time and dollars to ensure that these IT basics are rock-solid. Twenty-seven percent of the companies surveyed said it would take a full 24-hour day to recover lost data, and 10 percent said they would not be able to recover lost data at all. Imagine the impact of an event like this on your business. What would it mean in terms of sales, customer service, legal and compliance exposure—and maybe even your own job security? What can you do today to protect your data and your business from the inevitability of a data loss? This survey is a great reminder for all of us of how important it is to take those actions before it’s too late.

8 Strategies for an Efficient Post-Recession Data Center

Michael Kramer — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:10:22 -0400

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Just because the recession is officially over doesn’t mean it’s time to take the foot off the data center budget brake—not completely, anyway. Don’t get me wrong. The fact that data center spending is forecast to rebound to pre-recession levels and beyond—is good news. It means that companies are making some investments they might have delayed over the past couple of years. These investments not only will ensure that data centers are better meeting businesses’ growing performance needs—chief among them, the need to manage the data explosion—but also could help drive the economy.

But even though a loosening of the purse strings is a good thing, we shouldn’t ignore the data center efficiency lessons we learned from the recession. There are things you can do to stay efficient without sacrificing effectiveness. Here’s a look at some of the strategies to consider as you reevaluate data center spending in this post-recession era, among others suggested by CIO.com and ServerWatch.com:

Power Efficiency: From greener designs to technology improvements like virtualization, companies have been making changes to limit power consumption growth dramatically over the past few years. For both the spending and environmental impacts, this is an effort that’s well worth continuing.
Virtualization: A single server hosting multiple virtual machines reduces power, cooling and hardware replacement costs.
Automation: Data center automation can streamline routine tasks and help IT shops function with the smaller staff sizes that have resulted from the recession.
Data Relocation: Relocating non-critical data can save on storage and lighten the load on the data center.
Standardization: Standardizing servers and storage makes it easier to manage resources efficiently and predict capacity.
Application Consolidation: Running fewer applications, if you can do so while still meeting the business needs, will cut costs.
Service Levels: Reducing availability requirements from 99.999 percent to 99.9 percent, for example, might produce some cost savings while still meeting business requirements. So might reducing data center hours of operation.
Offsite Storage or Hosting: Using tape stored in an offsite facility, leveraging the cloud or collocating servers can help you manage all of your data without growing internal data center capacity.

As the CIO.com article offered, many of these principles can help extend the life of your data center by up to several years, delaying the requirement to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a data center upgrade, expansion or relocation. Companies clearly have gotten smarter during the recession about how they manage their data centers, and there’s no reason to abandon these strategies and invest in an overhaul sooner than you have to.

When it comes to data center budgeting, cautiously optimistic is the way to go. While we may no longer need to pinch pennies quite as hard as we did back in 2008 and 2009, efficiency is still important. The key is to strike a balance between freely spending to optimize effectiveness and slashing costs to run as lean as possible. There may be a fine line between the two, and there’s no right answer. But with 2012 budgeting well underway in many organizations, these strategies can help you find that balance for your business.

What is your take on data center budgeting? Are you finding that data center spending in organization is on the rebound?

The Volcker Rule: Will It Give Banks More Data to Manage?

Michael Kramer — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:30:00 -0400

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There’s yet another new banking regulation on the table—and this one’s making some waves. This time, the FDIC, SEC and other regulators are taking aim at how banks conduct their trading activity. The Volcker Rule—by far the most significant provision of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation passed last year—is designed to limit banks’ proprietary trading (trading conducted for the banks’ own profit and not on behalf of their clients). Proprietary trading is apparently a very profitable venture for many of our nation’s largest banks. They’ve been fighting the Volcker Rule tooth and nail, having spent a whopping $17.2 million just last year to lobby on the proposed regulation, according to The Hill.com.

Obviously, banks are up in arms about the Volcker Rule because they stand to lose some revenue as a result of its proposed restrictions. But banks are also resistant because the proposed regulation creates, according to the head of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s Washington office, “an overly complex and burdensome compliance regime.”

While no one’s talking specifically about the data impact yet, more compliance usually does mean more data to manage. The Volcker Rule likely will be no exception. The regulation spells out certain activities that are exempt from its proprietary trading ban. Demonstrating that their activities comply with the regulation requires banks to track information about each and every trade. For an industry that’s already struggling with how to manage seemingly infinite data stores, adding to that burden could be overwhelming.

The Volcker Rule was released last week in proposal form, is now open to public comment for 90 days and is slated to take effect in July. The banking industry is continuing to protest the Volcker Rule in its current form, and there’s no telling what the final product will look like. But one thing’s for sure: Once this new regulation takes effect, our clients and other firms in the financial services industry will need more than ever an affordable, easy-to-manage, long-term solution for storing all that data. With product and service offerings designed to help clients manage the ever-expanding data universe efficiently and effectively on tape, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the developments surrounding the Volcker Rule.

How Financial Services Can Seize the Big Data Opportunity

Michael Kramer — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:01:20 -0400

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The financial crisis sent some clear messages to the financial services industry. Among them: Get a better handle on your data. Now, in the supposed post-Great Recession era, banks and other financial institutions are being forced to do just that. And while getting a handle on their data is a truly onerous task for banks and other financial institutions, it’s more than that—it’s also a way to uncover some tremendous business opportunities.

To comply with new government regulations and public pressure (think Wall Street protests) to better manage their risk, financial services firms are capturing, tracking, managing and analyzing more and better data about consumers and the markets. They’re investing in the infrastructure and analysis tools needed to truly “get a handle” on their data. Clearly, this process is only just beginning. But it’s a start.

That’s the onerous part. But here’s where the opportunities come in. First of all, being forced to take a good, hard look at how they manage data is giving some banks the opportunity for a much-needed overhaul of their data management operations and structure. Turning the spotlight on data management practices is showing some organizations that there’s lots of room for improvement, and they’re cutting costs and increasing efficiency and effectiveness to meet the challenge.

Beyond the basics, all of this focus on data, coupled with new investments in world-class data management systems, is giving banks the opportunity to redeem themselves in the eyes of consumers by improving customer service. Why not use all that data to offer customers more personalized services based on their needs and behaviors, rather than just good-old-fashioned demographics? Why not offer more favorable pricing to the most low-risk, loyal customers, making them even more loyal?

Banks and other financial institutions also have the opportunity to turn their consumer data into revenue streams. Visa, for example, has put its “Big Data” to work in forecasting consumer trends. And here’s a great example of how banks are using consumer data to partner with retailers on customer incentive programs that are helping raise both revenue and customer loyalty.

The financial services industry has always had Big Data. And it’s only getting bigger as the entire industry is being forced to get its collective data warehouse in order, so to speak. The real winners will take it a step or two further and truly put their data to work for their business and their customers.