Tape-based backup is older than most people reading this article, and many organisations are still using it as either a primary or secondary backup solution. With tape backup systems, data and systems are backed up to magnetic media and stored locally or off-site in a (hopefully) secured tape storage facility. But there are a multitude of problems with tape backups, such as: tapes are usually stored in the same geographical area as the system they back up, and your tapes may not be available during a local or regional disaster, such as a hurricane, tornado or flood. Plus, tapes can also be lost, mislabelled or simply wear out. And let's not forget that lengthy restore times make it difficult to meet RPO and RTO/RTA goals.

When organisations running on IBM i finally realise that their current tape backup strategy no longer meets their needs, their decision is commonly spurred on by new requirements or backup and recovery failures, including:

  • The organisation has a tape restore failure, where they can't recover corrupted or missing data or an entire partition
  • A new requirement is defined by a regulatory entity or law, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), or the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
  • A new requirement is specified by a Service Level Agreement (SLA), a large customer, or from an audit point
  • A regional disaster such as Hurricane Irma occurs, where their local backup solution is destroyed along with the production system it protects
  • A hack, virus infection or ransomware attack hits their system and corrupts their files, and large-scale file restores must occur
  • They experience unintended data corruption or deleted objects that may take days, weeks or months to discover and recover from

An organisation's backup and recovery system is their last line of defence for protecting data availability and integrity.

At some point, organisations realise that tape backup can no longer satisfy all their backup and recovery needs by itself and begin upgrading their backup and recovery strategy. There are a number of options for efficiently and effectively updating your IBM i backup and recovery solution. An experienced business partner like CloudFirst can help your organisation select and implement the backup and recovery technology that's right for your business, no matter what the company's size or budget.

Please feel free to contact CloudFirst if you have any questions about improving your backup and recovery strategy.