Archive for Data protection

| August 13, 2013
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Data Growth Tests Storage Capabilities

 Data Growth Tests Storage CapabilitiesData Center Knowledge had an article by Steven Rodin, CEO of Storagepipe Solutions, that lays out the challenges that those of us charged with managing backups face every day. Storagepipe Solutions, which has been a provider of online backup services for business since 2001, has identified several emerging storage trends that organizations will need to overcome in the future.

Storagepipe Solutions logoIn the early days, the author says, organizations were primarily concerned with data protection, encryption and automation. The era of “Big Data” has changed those demands. The new demands are overwhelming most backup and storage systems. The article cites data from IBM (IBM), which claims that worldwide annual data production has actually exceeded worldwide storage capacity. Big Blue believes that demand for storage capacity is growing nearly 60 percent a year. The gap between the data that organizations produce and their ability to store it will continue to grow for years.

The Storagepipe Solutions CEO identified a number of important storage trends which are accelerating the growth rate of corporate data.  He provided a few of the most important factors.

Cheaper Storage Hardware

Cheaper HardwareHard drive capacity has fallen exponentially in price ever since Moore’s Law was introduced. This has changed attitudes to backups. The article says that today, hardware is so cheap and abundant that attitudes have shifted to a “Better keep this. We may need it someday” mentality.

New technologies, such as advancements in compression, deduplication and hardware virtualization, have improved overall storage utilization and further accelerated the rate at which the cost-per-gigabyte of storing data is falling.

Cheap and Abundant Bandwidth

Abundant BandwidthInternet bandwidth is no longer a bottleneck. Bandwidth availability has accelerated the growth of file sharing and online storage. Now large files are copied and distributed at an exponential rate which has caused duplicate data to become a major source of storage waste and data growth. The CEO of the firm based out of Toronto, calculates that if one person shares a 1GB file with 500 people, that’s half a terabyte of storage consumption.

Business is Going Paperless – Email has replaced letters, eBooks and tablets have nearly replaced paper books, and digital imaging has replaced photographs and x-rays. Not only are paperless offices better for the environment, but Mr. Rodin writes, they are also more productive, flexible and better able to extract value from their business data. Many industries are using more and more video (which is highly storage intensive) for marketing online, security and communication.

Enhanced Automated Data Collection Capabilities

Automated Data CollectionAutomated data collection is one of the fastest-growing areas in the “big data” space. With every move we make, the article says we’re generating GPS data, web traffic statistics, power usage data, surveillance video, and a broad range of data which companies and governments are collecting.

The author calls automated data collection the “Pandora’s Box” of the big data revolution. The information being collected about us through the electronic devices we use every day could present a threat to our privacy, but they also have the potential to offer tremendous value to society.

Advances in Data Analysis Technology

Data AnalysisThe blog says that until recently, data analysis was almost exclusively performed on structured relational databases, maintained and organized by humans. But now, a  new approach to data storage which focuses on rapid analysis and processing of vast data volumes. Technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra, MapReduce and NoSQL have given birth to a whole new class of services, and have revolutionized the way organizations think about the data they collect. Organizations can now get more insight into their internally generated business data by integrating external feeds and databases into their reporting and analysis.

The Growing Strategic Importance of Data

In the past, data was simply a tool which assisted in decision-making and helped companies execute on their strategic objectives. But recently Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and other brands have built their entire corporate strategy around the data they own. The DCK article states, information is power, and it’s now more powerful than ever.

Regulatory ComplianceRegulatory Compliance

Even if companies wanted to cut the amount of data they store, they wouldn’t always be able to. Laws like PIPEDA, HIPAA, Sox404 and many others are forcing companies to keep historical archives of their exponentially growing business data going back several years.

As this data grows, storage increasingly becomes a major business problem. Also, companies must plan for cost-efficient search and retrieval of these large historical data volumes to stay ready for an unexpected electronic discovery request.

As the scale and complexity of big data storage grows, it’ll quickly reach a point where manual handling is no longer practical, desirable, economical, or even possible. Automation will become absolutely essential when it comes to backing up big data.

Many big data applications have serious privacy implications for the customers that benefit from their use. So security will become a top priority for backup administrators. Gone are the days of unencrypted backup tapes.

The big data applications has created a whole new class of applications built on real-time data. These applications require much more frequent  backups to optimize Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Strategic big data apps will need minimized downtime. This means smaller backup windows, built-in redundancy, and server fail-over to disaster recovery sites.

That’s why many organizations are opting to outsource their data backups by partnering with experts who run ahead of the trends and who can help with the complexity of some situations.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Data protection | Tags: , , , , , , ,
| October 30, 2012
Comments Off on Mix Tape – The Future of Big Data Storage

Mix Tape – The Future of Big Data Storage

Mix Tapes - The Future of Big Data StorageThe mix tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way according to New Scientist. From the updates posted by Facebook’s (FB) 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organization worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need to store massive amounts of data is greater than ever. Hard drives have been the workhorse of large storage operations for decades. However, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives is set to the replace the HDD. The new tape drives pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy in the size of a 1980’s mix tape, according to the article.

Researchers at Fuji Film (4901) and IBM (IBM) have already built prototypes that can store 35 terabytes of data. The cartridge which measures 10 centimeters by 10 cm by 2 cm, can store  about 35 million books’ worth of information. This is achieved using magnetic tape coated with nanoparticles of barium ferrite. The coating stabilizes magnetic storage media by keeping moisture and oxidation (rust) from damaging the surface of storage tape.

But the real début for this technology, the author speculates will be with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope when it is completed in 2024. SKA will consist of thousands of antennas across the southern hemisphere. Once it’s up and running, the SKA is expected to pump out 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of compressed data per day. If the SKA data archive was built using today’s 3-terabyte HDD’s, the telescope would fill an unmanageable 120,000 drives a year.

Data recovery100 terabytes on a cartridge

That annual archive growth would swamp an experiment that is expected to last decades, says IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou, who is part of a team working to build tapes for the SKA. The IBMer says that by the time the telescope comes online, they  expect to be able to store 100 terabytes. They plan to store that much data by shrinking the width of the recording tracks and using more accurate systems for positioning the read-write heads used to access them.

Using tapes should cut down drastically on energy use, too. A 2010 study by Clipper Group found that data centers with disc drive arrays use over 200 times more power than would a tape library of similar size. Disc drives in large arrays tend to stay powered-up, so their platters spin continuously, in case data is required, says Jon Hiles of Spectra Logic, a digital archiving firm in Boulder, CO. But tape drives only use power when they are being read or recorded on, he says.

The downside of tapes

The downside of tapes is that they are slower to access than hard discs. Tapes have to be fetched by a robotic mechanism, inserted in a reader and spooled to the right point. But the Linear Tape File System, expedites this process to make it comparable to disc drives, Eleftheriou told the blog. As storage needs skyrocket, hard drives won’t be able to keep up and keep power down, Eleftheriou says. Density improvements in hard drives are facing physical limits that mean they can only add more power-munching platters. “It’s time to take advantage of the low power and low-cost of tape,” he says.

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It is unlikely even the largest firm will need the kind of capacity SKA’s IT staff will have to deal with every day. But it is likely that every organization that stores big data on-site will be looking for low-cost, high-capacity alternatives to disk. However I would not want to trust 35 TB (or more) of data to a cassette which can be easily destroyed. Do you think the 80’s mix tape cassettes  are the future of big data storage?

Do you think cassette tapes are the future of big data storage?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Data protection | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| April 24, 2012
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States Collect More School Kid Data Than Needed

States Collect More School Kid Data Than NeededStates often collect far more information about school students than necessary and fail to take adequate steps to protect their privacy, a national study by Fordham University concludes. The Washington Post reports that dossiers go far beyond test scores, including Social Security numbers, poverty data, health information, and disciplinary incidents.

PrivacyThe study from the Fordham University Center on Law and Information Policy casts light on data systems created at the urging of the federal government to track student progress. One finding: States often fail to spell out protocols for purging records after students graduate.

“Ten, 15 years later, these kids are adults, and information from their elementary, middle, and high school years will easily be exposed by hackers and others who put it to misuse,” said Fordham law professor Joel R. Reidenberg, who oversaw the study. States, he told the Washington Post, “are trampling the privacy interests of those students.”

No Child Left BehindThe movement toward statewide databases with unique student identifiers, rooted in the standards-and-testing movement of the 1990s, has grown significantly in this decade under the federal No Child Left Behind law and is getting a fresh push this school year from the Obama administration. The article says federal officials want to link student test scores to teacher files to help evaluate instruction. They also envision systems that track students from pre-kindergarten through college, to help raise college completion rates.

Nearly all states, have built or are planning virtual education “data warehouses,” aided by federal funding. Advocates say the warehouses have strong privacy protections, but they acknowledge potential shortcomings according to the author.

Data mining“Is there data collected that’s not necessary anymore?” asked Aimee Guidera, executive director of the Data Quality Campaign, based in the District, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. “Probably.” She cited Kansas and Tennessee schools as leaders in establishing rules for data control.

But a larger concern, Guidera said, is that states often lack “a strategic, thoughtful way of connecting information and using it to answer questions.”

The Fordham study canvassed public information on state data systems and compliance with federal privacy law writes the Washington Post. Among the findings, at least 23 states note reasons for withdrawal from schools such as jail, illness, or mental health issues. At least 22 count student absences. At least 29 track whether students are homeless.

Data theftThe study also found that at least 16 states use or allow the use of Social Security numbers to identify school students and at least 10 note whether a student is a single parent. Another finding: Florida, Kentucky, New Jersey, and North Carolina track the date of a student’s last medical exam.

The Washington Post says Fordham recommended that states tighten protocols to keep data anonymous, with special provisions for those in local schools who need to know more; that they articulate reasons for collecting data and jettison what is unjustified; and that they appoint officers to oversee compliance with state and federal privacy laws.

Charles Pyle, a Virginia Department of Education spokesman, said data are protected through policies and programming that prevent unauthorized access. The data help the states comply with NCLB, he said, and help pinpoint student needs. “You need a statewide system to keep track of the kids,” Grover Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, told the paper. He oversaw education research for President George W. Bush’s administration and claims, “Otherwise, they fall off the screen.”

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The lackadaisical attitude toward data security and privacy I see in K-12 amazes me. This article tells me it’s a national problem. – Why don’t I feel any better about that?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Data protection | Tags: , , , , , ,
| July 2, 2011
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AccountKiller KO’s Online Accounts

AccountKiller KO's Online Accounts AccountKiller.com says it is a website dedicated to helping social network users reclaim their personal data. The website helps users reclaim their personal data by explaining and ranking social networking sites. The website explains how to delete online accounts and ranks them by how hard it is to reclaim your personal information.

AccountKiller provides instructions to remove your account or public profile on most popular websites, including Skype, Facebook, Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Live, Hotmail, MSN,  Twitter,  Google (GOOG), and many more.

The creators of AccountKiller have also created a blacklist of sites that do not allow their users to reclaim their online account information.  According to the website a black-listed site indicates it’s probably impossible or highly difficult to get rid of your account. Among the sites AccountKiller has blacklisted are:

The grey-listed sites may cost you some irritation or effort – but it should be possible to terminate your online accounts says AccountKiller. These sites will require you need to send a mail to the site, send a message using a webform or even call them to recover your personal information.

The creators of AccountKiller say that social media sites purposely make it difficult or even impossible to delete your account for two reasons. First, because they are profiting from their users’ data. These sites are in the business of data customer retention.  Alternatively, they suggest that these developers may simply be ignorant, lazy, or incompetent, i.e. not being able to create some account deletion function.

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Kudos to the creators of AccountKiller, I now recommend this site to anyone who has questions about these social networking sites. It is time for social networking sites to provide transparency into their real business model, data collection, otherwise, there could be a social networking bubble.

What do you think?

Do you know how to get out of your social networking sites? Can you?

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Apple (AAPL)
Category: Data protection | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| April 6, 2011
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BP Data Spill

Data breachNational Public Radio (NPR) reports that British Petroleum‘s (BP) problems in the U.S. now include a data spill as well as the oil spill. BP is paying compensation amounting to $4,000,000,000 to victims of its mishap incident disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Now BP has lost the personally identifiable information (PII)  on approx. 13,000 of its victims are seeking compensation for oil spill damages. NPR reports that names, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers, were lost opening these people to identity theft.

BP Gulf of Mexico oil spillBP spokesman Curtis Thomas told NPR that the oil giant mailed letters to roughly 13,000 people whose data was stored on the missing computer, notifying them about the potential data security breach and offering to pay for their credit to be monitored. The company also reported the missing laptop to law enforcement, he said. The laptop was password-protected, but the information was not encrypted, Mr. Thomas said.

The employee lost the laptop on March 1 during “routine business travel,” said BP’s Thomas, who declined to elaborate on the circumstances. “If it was stolen, we think it was a crime of opportunity, but it was initially lost,” Thomas said. Asked why nearly a month elapsed before BP notified residents about the missing laptop, Mr. Thomas said, “We were doing our due diligence and investigating.”

Matt O’Brien, the part-owner of Tiger Pass Seafood, a shrimp dock in Venice, La., who said he had filed a claim with BP, told an AP reporter this was the first he had heard about the possible compromise of his personal information by BP. “That’s like it’s par for the course for them.” Mr. O’Brien said of BP, “They can’t seem to do nothing right.”

Once again, 13,000 lives are disrupted because a single laptop that was not encrypted, was lost or stolen “during routine business travel.” Sophos‘ Naked Security blog pointed out in 2008 that laptops are easy to lose. The security vendor cited a survey that found that 12,000 laptops are lost every week at U.S. airports alone.

In that 2008 survey, almost three years ago now, 53% of people said that their laptops contained confidential business information, with two-thirds having taken no measures to secure their data. Clearly, some companies still aren’t taking proper measures.

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As BP again has demonstrated, we all need to lift our game, As Sophos says, even if your organization is willing to take risks with your own data, firms have a clear moral duty not to take risks with data you keep about other people.

During these economic times, many organizations are saving a few pennies by doing as little as possible about encryption-related security. Why not consider the value of encryption to your business, instead of considering only the cost?

What do you think?

Oil spills, Data spills, Outrageous gas prices – Is BP out to get the U.S.?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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