Navigating cybersecurity in an uncertain world

Far from being defeated, ransomware and other cyberattacks are going from strength to strength. Threat actors are now pooling their criminal knowledge to create powerful cartels, on a mission to find new and ever more insidious ways to disrupt businesses and make huge profits as victims scramble to recover. To have any chance of winning the battle, IT professionals need to shift their focus because the pandemic has to some extent rewritten the rules.

So if it is inevitable that you will be the victim of cybercrime, in addition to taking preventative steps like deploying anti-virus security software and other counter measures, the best way to protect your data is to place a copy somewhere where you can be certain thieves won’t be able to reach it.

Today, the most secure and inaccessible form of storage, which is readily available to every business at a reasonable price point and capable of scaling from terabytes to even exabytes, is LTO Ultrium tape.

For streaming large, contiguous volumes when the tapes are accessible, LTO-8 technology is more or less equivalent in streaming performance to consumer grade flash and certainly much faster than the SATA HDDs most commonly used for private cloud object storage solutions).

 But in the new world in which we now live, these relatively manageable inconveniences pale into comparison when set aside what tape delivers to companies who suffer a ransomware attack and are locked outside all of their data. The best and most compelling recent example of this is what happened to Spectra Logic.

 Because ransomware is now so widespread, it’s very likely there are more companies benefiting from tape assistance than the news would have us be aware of. That certainly seems to be one of the takeaways from the ESG Tape Landscape report for 2020 available from the LTO Program. Amongst survey respondents, the most common mechanism used to recover from cyber attack is tape backup. And of those using isolated storage protection, 61% were using tape to put in place the crucial air gap that is almost impossible for online cyberattack to penetrate.

In my mind there is no doubt that in spite of being a very familiar and traditional storage platform, tape support for backup and archiving should remain a key part of the circular fort of layered defences against the threat of cyberattack and ransomware.