Tape remediation is quickly becoming the preferred method
"How many backup tapes do you have?"
"I have no idea - probably thousands."
"Do you need to keep them?"
"No."
"Why don't you recycle them?"
"Legal won't let us."
This might be a typical storage manager's response when questioned about a company's backup tape stockpile. These tapes are often created in response to a key objective of any IT organization - to protect enterprise data assets. Thus a mountain of old backup tapes has been amassed, largely tapes that have long outlived their disaster recovery purpose. Why not recycle or destroy all these old tapes? Federal regulations forbid it. Data on these tapes "may" be necessary to support current or future litigation. What data? A very, very small percentage of what exists, typically less than 1 percent. Why then keep all these tapes? Because it has been next to impossible to separate the useless data from what legal requires.
Sometime down the road, if not already, specific data from backup tapes will be requested by legal. Some corporate legal teams have proactively issued a mandate to not touch tapes; others have been forced to do so. Either way, stricter regulations are forcing the issue. The June 2009 California Electronic Discovery Act, for example, declares all electronically stored information should be accessible and requires it to be produced. In January 2010 Judge Scheindlin, the judge on the groundbreaking Zubulake v. UBS Warburg case, issued an opinion where she denied the use of the burdensome argument, called out the defendant as grossly negligent, and issued sanctions against UBS Warburg for not collecting data from backup tapes to support the case. The courts are ruling more frequently against firms that do not produce data, including tape data, in a timely manner. Many cases exist today where fines have been imposed against the botched collection of historical files and email. Will your company be next?
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Source: sys-con.com
By: Jim McGann
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