Offline and off-site tape backup-as-a-service for disaster recovery and long-term data storage in Switzerland

"What is your last line of defence against ransomware?"

Protect your company against cyberattacks and ransomware.

Experience shows that offline backups on tape are the only way to be 100% sure that healthy data can be restored after a cyber incident, human error or insider attacks. Unlike cloud storage, offline data is off limits to malware.

Implement business continuity and disaster recovery policies.

If it is true that companies are becoming software (Jay Kreps), then data is the most important and most valuable corporate resource warranting due protection.

Meet compliance requirements of Swiss cyber insurers.

Swiss cyber insurers (AXA, Zurich) require companies to take "appropriate measures to protect the insured data against the covered risks". De facto, this means a backup strategy with an offline backup cycle of at least 7 days.

Reduce your carbon footprint.

Tape drives run on an as-needed basis and consume less power than other long-term storage devices. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft Azure all rely heavily on tape in their cold storage tiers.

Zero hardware to manage.

Relieve your staff from the IT overhead associated with contingency planning. We can pick up your external hard drives or ingest your data via a secure private connection directly from your preferred cloud hyperscaler.

Pay as you go (PAYG) pricing model.

Our pricing model for backing up data is tailored to your data backup requirements: you only pay for the amount of data actually backed up.

What is LTO technology?

Linear Tape Open (LTO) also known as the LTO Ultrium format is a powerful alternative data storage format and one of the most effective disaster recovery strategies available. It is a low-cost, high-capacity, reliable, portable and secure file archive solution developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum (here).

Tape technology is promoted by the LTO Program to guarantee interoperability between drives and media from multiple licensed vendors. Companies thus have the freedom to choose any combination of devices, libraries and cartridges without the risk of being locked into proprietary technology.

Offline storage on magnetic tape cartridge complements hard disk, flash and cloud solutions in diversified storage architectures, providing a last line of defence against cyberattacks, ransomware and disaster in the bottom tier.

Offline copies of LTO tapes separate data archives from the connected environment. Systems can be restored using clean tape copies of the data following security breaches and catastrophic events.

What are the pros and cons of tape technology?

Tape offers many benefits, including impressively high restore rates for very large volumes of data. LTO technology has become the de facto tape format standard worldwide, and tape systems can integrate with various systems onsite or offsite, including many on-premise/private cloud solutions.

Benefits of tape

• Longevity: If maintained properly, tape drives can store data for 30 years or more
• Archival stability: Tape backups are used for long-term retention of critical data
• Security: Tape's removable media is off-line to the threats from viruses, hackers and cyber-attacks that online data on disk is exposed to
• Privacy: LTO tape technology supports encryption and WORM functionality (Write Once, Read Many), which are critical for industries with strict data compliance and retention policies - an attractive choice for often highly regulated industries that work with vast amounts of data, such as government, healthcare, and financial services
• Sustainability: Tape drives run on an as-needed basis and consume less power and generate less heat than other storage devices
• Speed: A single LTO-9 10 tape cartridge can hold 90 TB of compressed data (36 TB uncompressed) with transfer speeds of 400 MB/s (native) or 1,000 MB/s with 2.5:1 compression—considerably faster than HDDs

Downsides of tape

• Initial cost of capital: Tape backup systems require a tape backup drive which is costly or a tape library which is even costlier
• Restoring data from a tape backup can take a long time: Access to data written to hard disks is possible from anywhere on the disk whereas tape drives are accessed sequentially, meaning that it can take some time to find a particular file
• Logistics: Offsite and offline tapes need to be physically transported to the location in which they ultimately recovered. This can add a extra day to recovery times, which is not always ideal for business continuity
• Data transfer: Private and secure connections to relevant cloud service providers may generate additional costs
  

What is the 3-2-1-backup rule?

The 3-2-1 backup strategy simply states that you should have 3 copies of your data:

• Make 3 copies of your data
• Store it on 2 different media supports
• Of which one copy is onsite and one copy is off-site (and potentially off-line)

The last point is important: unlike network and cloud storage, offline data is unreachable by malware.

How quickly can I bounce back?

The minimum backup frequency is determined by the recovery point objective (RPO) for a specific cluster of information assets (database, data lake, data store, data stream).

For instance, if the RPO is 1 hour, system administrators need to schedule backups at least once an hour. In this case, an external hard drive may be the best backup platform for disaster recovery. If, however, the RPO is 5 days, backups must be scheduled at intervals of 5 days or less. In this case, tape storage may be a satisfactory solution.

Is tape the "greenest" storage format?

As magnetic tapes are “unplugged”, they do not consume energy for most of their life. In addition, they last longer, with an estimated lifespan of more than 30 years compared to 5 years for hard disks. Ultimately, tape media produces only 3% of the carbon dioxide that hard disks produce.

What is a cold (off-site, air-gapped) backup?

An air-gap backup is a method of data storage used in cybersecurity and disaster recovery where critical data is copied and stored on media or machines that are “offline” and virtually inaccessible via the Internet.

What are the benefits of a golden copy during a ransomware attack?

Golden copies which can be demonstrated to be free of ransomware can play an important role in the data recovery after a ransomware attack and therefore deserve to be paid renewed attention in the BCP.

What is cold data?

In the field of data archiving, the term "cold data" refers to data that is rarely accessed and is therefore classified as cold. To optimize storage costs, such inactive data can be stored on less powerful and less expensive storage media. For example, solid state-of-the-art disks could be used to store hot data, while cold data can be migrated to hard disks, cloud storage or magnetic tapes.

What is dark data?

Dark data is defined (here) as all information which was collected, but not yet put to meaningful use to derive business insights or underlie informed decisions. It is estimated that about 90% of data generated by many IoT devices (sensors etc.), but also application system logs, metrics, measurement data or any type of metadata (geodata etc.) never gets used. Dark data is often saved for regulatory or legal retention purposes or in the belief that it may be of value in future business intelligence workflows.

In reality, however, the storage of dark data greatly contributes to the environmental pollution and the waste of energy in data centres. According to a studies, only about 15% of data centre capacity is used by business-critical data, while dark and redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data represents the rest.

Dark data exists outside streamlined Extract, Transfer, Load (ETL) pipelines, in other words, it cannot be processed by a computer - a good example would be a scanned page of a book before the text images were recognized as strings of words by optical character recognition (OCR). Often, the analytical ressources needed for bringing light into dark data are simply disproportionate with the data's potential value.

The continuous storage of dark data in the hope of deriving future value from it can also represent a risk factor for companies, as it enlarges the risk surface for security breaches. Responsible data governance is key here.

When should I use tape backup?

• Data which is no longer important to an organization ("nonvalue data") and for which there is no statutory or internal retention period can be destroyed in a controlled manner. Where there is doubt, storage on tape is a cost-efficient alternative.
• Tape backups are the ideal option if you have large amounts of data that is rarely accessed and needs to be stored over a prolonged time period.
  

Keep always 3 copies of your data

Keep copies in 2 different formats

Keep 1 data copy off-site at all times

Keep one data copy offline

Further reading

Deutsches Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (2024) Schritt für Schritt zur Datensicherung (here)

IBM (2022) IBM Tape Library Guide for Open Systems (here)

Sophia Flucker, Vincent Fogarty (2023) Data Centre Essentials: Design, Construction, and Operation of Data Centres for the Non-expert (here)