As soon as disks entered the data storage industry, many tape storage manufacturers thought to exit the storage business. The reason is as the market was moving towards faster tech like Solid State Storage(SSDs) that have now replaced hard disk drives in PCs and other computing applications.
Now, the trend seems to have changed as companies involved in the business of Linear Tape-Open(LTO) are seeing a surge in business sales. As this storage medium is not connected to the internet and is offline, it cannot be infected with ransomware…hmm, as of now.
The year 2021 witnessed a storage capacity sale of 150 million terabytes, which was 35% more when compared to the sales of the year 2019. In the year 2020, the sale of the compressed capacity was just over 100 exabytes.
Stronger data protection measures, allergic to cyber threats, reliable, cost-effective, high-capacity availability, and conducive to long-term data archival needs are making the storage makers like HP Enterprise, IBM and Quantum Corporation register an increase in sales- as per a report from Sweclockers, a Sweden-based technology magazine.
What makes tape storage averse to cyber attacks?
Well, it’s simple! Such storage media needs physical access; which means cannot be accessed from remote servers via the internet. So, the technology acts as an air-gap in keeping the information stored securely, as a hacker needs to break into a data center and access the tape media and take much time to steal data. And it is a tedious process to copy data from these media and destroy it.
However, the only disadvantage is that it needs a lot of space to store tape drives and maintain data inventory.
So, is this a silver bullet for those searching for storage media that can keep hackers at bay?
Well, to a certain extent, we can say. But as every technology has its own pros and cons, tape storage media is also filled with subjective analysis and so all depends on the application for which we are using it.
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