11:30 AM -- PricewaterhouseCoopers International 's recent "Global State of Information Security 2008" survey of 7,000 corporate and IT executives revealed that, as of the spring of 2008 when the survey was conducted, fewer than half the organizations encrypted their backup tapes. Even in the financial services industry, where you would think someone's paying attention, only 57 percent of organizations encrypt backup tapes.
While these figures are better than the 37 percent encryption rate for tapes in the 2007 survey, they're still a cause for concern, as is the 50 percent, up from 40 percent, rate of data encryption on enterprise laptops.
Many storage, and security, professionals underestimate the risk of tapes getting loose. After all, the tapes are behind several layers of physical security in the data center or sent by bonded couriers to Iron Mountain Inc. (NYSE: IRM) or another secure facility. What could go wrong?
Well, if you read the news, a lot. Citibank, Bank of New York, and others have had tapes disappear in transit. Most amusingly, a courier for a vendor storing tapes for the University of Utah Hospital decided to skip picking up the company van, complete with drop safe, and used his personal car to pickup tapes. Of course, the tapes were stolen from his driveway, and I assume he's looking for a new position. Hopefully, "Do you want fries with that?" is part of his vocabulary.
The odds of a customer or patient's personally identifiable information getting to someone that would actually use it, from a backup tape that was lost in a vendor's warehouse or misdelivered to another customer, are low. After all, it's hard enough to restore data from a tape you made three years ago, let alone one where you don't even know what software was used to create it. But a real data breach isn't the primary risk in lost or stolen tapes.
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IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
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