Tape backups are too expensive

It’s almost 2017 and many organizations are still using tape to archive their data. According to a new report by Kroll Ontrack, that can be challenging, risky and expensive.

After polling 819 IT administrators, more than a quarter (27 percent) don’t have clear insight into which information is being backed up on legacy tapes. It can also be quite costly.

Survey respondents have said that maintaining legacy tape backup solutions can cost anywhere between £8,000 and £1 million. The biggest drivers of cost are storage, maintenance and staff. All in all, almost 40 percent want to terminate their maintenance contracts exclusively due to high costs.

Robin England, senior research and development engineer at Kroll Ontrack notes, "It is imperative that enterprises know what data is on their legacy tapes and be able to quickly react, for example, when responding to investigations involving custodian data, regulatory requests from a government agency or as part of an ediscovery matter. Nearly half of companies surveyed (49 per cent) confirmed they run two or three different backup solutions, with an additional seven per cent running four or more parallel solutions. This not only raises the level of difficulty of knowing where their data resides and being able to respond accordingly, but also significantly increases the cost for managing legacy tape data".

The company behind the report, Kroll Ontrack, offered everyone an alternative solution, which allows organizations to search tape data. Only after finding what they really need, they can send a request to Kroll Ontrack to restore the data.

Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Future plc Publication. All rights reserved.

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