Iron Mountain Offsite Tape Vaulting and Managed Services

Challenge: Rising storage costs and cyber threats

Organisations generate vast amounts of structured, unstructured, sensitive, and long-term archival data, all of which require secure, cost-effective storage solutions. However, as cyberattacks become more frequent, relying solely on cloud backups poses a significant risk. These environments are highly accessible and can be vulnerable to network breaches and ransomware attacks.

Solution: Air-gapped tape storage

Iron Mountain provides comprehensive Offsite Tape Vaulting and Managed Services solutions that create a physical “air gap” for your critical data. By keeping data offline and offsite, tape storage becomes inaccessible and protected from remote attacks. This strategy serves as a crucial physical barrier and the final line of defense against digital threats.

Integrating tape into your backup process easily fulfills the 3-2-1-0 backup rule:

• Redundancy: 3 copies of data
• Diversity: 2 different media types
• Isolated copy: 1 offsite that is air-gapped
• Recoverability: 0 opportunity for data infiltration

Key benefits of an air-gapped tape strategy

• Secure: Tape provides an offline, air-gapped data copy immune to network-spreading ransomware, ensuring secure recovery.
• Cost-effective: Tape offers the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the lowest per-terabyte costs.
• “De-egress” savings: Minimise the high costs commonly associated with data egress and cloud storage transfer fees.
• Scalable: Increasing tape capacities makes it a smart investment in digital resilience.
• Durable: When stored in the right environment, linear tape open (LTO) cartridges are durable for up to 30 years, reducing data migration costs compared to hard disk drives (HDD).
• Compliant: Tape supports Write Once, Read Many (WORM) technology for data immutability, ensuring compliance and legal retention.
• Sustainable: Tape only requires power for reading or writing data, making it a more energy-efficient option for digital storage.

Iron Mountain offers a comprehensive service portfolio

• Offsite Tape Vaulting: Temperature and humidity- controlled facilities featuring physical barriers, keycard access, CCTV, and specialised non-water fire suppression systems, with underground options available
• Managed Services and Tape Library Moves: Trained Iron Mountain staff to manage your tape environment, freeing up your internal IT resources for mission- critical demands, alongside comprehensive media relocation and tracking
• Data Migration and Restoration Services: One-time restoration projects, ad hoc cataloging, and seamless data migration between tape, disk, and cloud environments
• Technology Assistance: Support for tape operations when you lack the necessary infrastructure, including backup and data access services and file- format updates that reduce the need to maintain outdated systems
• IT Asset Disposition: Secure collection, transportation, and destruction of electronic media and IT devices at the end of their lifecycle
• Disaster Recovery Support: We offer 24/7 tape delivery to your data centre, Iron Mountain’s, or to one of your partners. This service ensures mission-critical data is accessible for routine testing or urgent recovery after a cyberattack or system failure