Data: Lost, Stolen or Strayed

Computerworld - Moving magnetic tapes in and out of storage would seem to be the most mundane of IT functions. Indeed, companies have traditionally seen the transportation and storage of backup media as so routine that they have relegated it to non-IT personnel such as couriers or outsourced the job entirely. But that's changing now, following a rash of high-profile horror stories involving lost data that have been compounded by legislatures and courts that no longer buy the "the dog ate my tapes" excuses.

In February, Bank of America Corp. lost a tape with credit card information on 1.2 million customers. In April, Ameritrade Holding Corp. told 200,000 current and past customers that a tape containing confidential account information had been lost or destroyed in transit. Time Warner Inc. reported in May that 40 tapes containing personal data on 600,000 current and former employees had been lost en route to a storage facility. In June, Citigroup Inc. said that a box of tapes holding personal information on 3.9 million customers had disappeared on the way to a credit bureau.

And sometimes tapes go missing inside a company's four walls. In March, a Florida judge hearing a $2.7 billion lawsuit by financier Ronald Perelman against Morgan Stanley issued an "adverse inference order" against the company for "willful and gross abuse of its discovery obligations."

The judge cited Morgan Stanley for repeatedly finding misplaced tapes of e-mail messages long after the company had claimed that it had turned over all such tapes to the court.

In theory, there are straightforward ways to avoid these costly and embarrassing mishaps. But those measures, such as data encryption and backing up to remote sites via secure networks, have serious drawbacks, so it's likely that trucks full of tapes holding sensitive information will be roaming the roads for years to come.

Image Credit: Richard Downs

Driven in part by regulatory requirements, Xcel Energy Inc. in Minneapolis backs up data to tape "in terabytes per week," according to Mike Carlson, vice president of business transfer and customer value. The tapes are taken off-site and stored by Iron Mountain Inc., a Boston-based records management and storage company.

Asked if his company is taking any special steps as a result of the recent highly publicized tape mishaps -- Iron Mountain acknowledged that it lost the Time Warner tapes -- Carlson says, "We are actively working with them to ensure that it's not a systematic glitch that puts us at risk." Nevertheless, there will always be some risk of human error, he says.

Iron Mountain performs at a 99.999% level of reliability in its media transportation and storage operations, says Ken Rubin, executive vice president for marketing. "Over the past 50 years, we have honed a chain of custody and inventory control process," he says. "We have basically automated out of the process nearly all of the exposure to human error, but not 100% of it."