Catch 22 of Backup Tapes

Disaster recovery best practices seem to be in conflict with data security best practices these days. Disaster recovery suggests that you should backup your data and take the backups off site, ensuring that you have backups to use in the event of the catastrophic destruction of your entire data center or building. The downside, however, is that tapes get lost or stolen in transit. Tapes containing gigabytes of unencrypted data are vulnerable during transport and possibly at the storage location and that makes them a security risk. Bank of America recently had a tape go missing with hundreds of thousands of customer's personal information on it and now Ameritrade has announced that they have lost a tape with 200,000 customer files on it. This article on SecurityFocus by Robert Lemos takes a look at the risks posed by backup tapes. Backup Tapes a Back Door For Identity Thieves