Most enterprise backup solutions require that you use removable media for offsite backup. In my November 17, 2011 blog post, 5 Pitfalls and Best Practices for Data Recovery from Backups, I talked about using removable physical media to hold, transport, and store enterprise data backups offsite and how that subjects your data to the potential risks of loss or theft. The same risks also apply to copies, like ones made by employees taking data to or from work and home.
Physical storage media can be lost, misplaced, or stolen in transit. Anywhere outside a secure data center, computer room, or office area — like in a taxi, at an airport, or walking along the street — poses a security risk. This is true regardless of whether your backup media is a thumb drive, CD/DVD optical disk, tape, external hard drive, or a full backup appliance.
Thumb drives and CD/DVD disks are particularly easy — and prone — to being lost or mislaid. They are also easy to be stolen. They are small, even if in an envelope or other packaging — small enough to fit in a pocket, slide through a taxi seat cushion, fall behind a desk, or be buried in a pile of other envelopes, packages, magazines, and other clutter.
Tapes, external hard drives, and backup appliances may be somewhat harder to lose or have stolen. But with one-terabyte drives that fit in a shirt pocket, or a well-dressed thief carrying a briefcase, even these backups are vulnerable.
This is hardly speculation. News headlines over the past few years have included many such incidents. For example, on November 4, 2011, UCLA announced that a hard drive with information on 16,288 patients was stolen from a doctor’s home. Back in May 1996, a data analyst for the United States Veterans Affairs brought home sensitive information on 26.5 million veterans on his laptop — which was then stolen as part of a home burglary. Companies that have recently reported losing backup tapes include Ameritrade, Bank of New York Mellon Corp, and GE Money.
The potential damage of lost, misplaced or stolen physical media containing backups is similar to online theft and loss: If the data on the backup is unprotected — unencrypted — the consequences can be expensive and dire, even if the actual data is never misused.
If the backup contained sensitive personal data such as financial or health records, the event can lead to identity theft. Even if the data is not abused, the company can be liable for the cost and effort of remediation, including contacting impacted people and paying for them to get credit checks done.
The per-person cost of notifications adds up quickly, plus there may be fines, along with the time spent notifying data owners and, under HIPAA HITECH, also notifying the media. The remediation costs for a lost, stolen or misplaced CD, flash drive or other device containing unsecured sensitive data can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars. Or, given an estimated cost of remediation at $100 per person, it can cost a lot more, when millions or tens of millions of personal records are put at risk.
Even if no sensitive personal data is involved, the backup may have customer data, trade secrets, or other company Intellectual Property, which is subject to abuse.
There can also be softer costs, like the time spent determining what data was put at risk, lost productivity, lost sales, or reputation damage. Public awareness of a data loss/theft event can damage a company’s reputation, which in turn may cause customers to reduce their orders, and for existing and potential customers to take their business elsewhere.
If stolen or missing data is encrypted, the amount of damage is contained. But the company will still have to invest time and money recreating and re-sending the misplaced, missing, lost or stolen media.
Steps for physical-media backup security include:
- ALWAYS encrypt backed-up data, whether it is stored onsite or off.
- If a backup does travel offsite, be sure to use a reliable, trackable method of transport.
- The final location must be physically secure, such as a bank vault or data storage facility.
The surest way to avoid the risks and pitfalls of using physical media to transport enterprise backups is to not use physical media, but instead use an online backup service that overcomes multiple data retrieval pitfalls associated with most tape, disk and cloud-based backup solutions. An example of such a service is Zetta. It provides an affordable, enterprise-class data protection service that includes online enterprise backup with instant disaster recovery. To learn more, visit the Zetta Enterprise Online Backup and Instant Recovery resource site.