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Is Your Tape Backup an Area for Concern?

Is tape backup sufficient? If you are like most companies, your reliance on tape is an area for concern. Please check out the article below on ASK Backup and Disaster Recovery.

Tape, in contrast to disk, is physically delicate and easily compromised by environmental factors such as heat, humidity, and magnetic interference. Moreover, tape cartridges must be replaced frequently (every 6-12 months). Tape's innate sensitivity contributes to high failure rates, with analysts estimating that anywhere from 42 to 71 percent of tape restores fail. Even when magnetic tape backups are successful, tapes themselves are subject to loss or theft, and may be in the possession of an employee or vendor unable to reach a recovery site. Thus, even when physical backup and restoration processes succeed, tape may not prove to be as timely and appropriate a medium for data storage as disk. Time is a crucial consideration because each hour of server, application, and network downtime endured until data restoration comes at a high cost, especially to smaller businesses. Also, tape is typically not encrypted. This is a big security concern that has gotten headlines in the recent past.

ASK offers fully managed onsite and offsite backup and recovery services. Our unique offering allows business to take snapshots of their live data on the fly and archive them for disaster recovery and restoration purposes. Our solution allows companies to decide whether to backup data onsite for ease of restoration, offsite for added security, or both for the maximum disaster recovery and business continuity solution. Our software is fully monitored by our Network Operations Center and help with a restoration or backup problem is just a phone call away. As an added feature our Backup Solution allows individual servers to be Virtualized on our backup device to allow for seamless operations in the case of a catastrophic server hardware failure.

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