A recent article that was published by Cleary’s Note Book raises some interesting points about the security and reliability of storing critical business data to unencrypted physical media such as external hard drives or backup tapes. If your company is currently relying on traditional manual business continuity processes like this, it may be worth your while to take a moment and read the whole article.

According to gloucestercitynews.net, an important hard drive had gone missing from one of the processing rooms at the National Archives in MD on March 24, 2009, which may have possibly contained a lot of sensitive personally identifiable information that dates back to the Clinton Administration.

The incident has triggered a formal investigation by the Secret Service and the National Archives Office of the Inspector General. The investigation is primarily aimed at recovering the drive, and it’s not yet clear whether they suspect willful theft as the cause of the disappearance.

The hard drive in question was a 2TB MY BOOK external hard drive, manufactured by Western Digital. On the drive, was stored a copy of some backup tapes from the Executive Office of the President dating back to the Clinton Administration.

If you somehow manage to come across information relating to the whereabouts of this drive, you’d be strongly advised to contact the authorities immediately. National Archives and Records Administration is offering a $50K reward for the safe return of the device and the information contained within.

Now this brings up a good point. A large organization like the U.S. Government (who has extensive experience in handling and protecting large amounts of extremely sensitive information) has potentially been compromised by an individual stealing unencrypted backups stored to a physical media. If it can happen to them, it can certainly happen to any of us.

Unencrypted physical media is a very risky way to protect your information. As more privacy regulations continue to emerge, and the number of privacy-related cases before the courts continues to grow, it’s now becoming more important than ever that you take additional measures to secure your backups.

Today, there are numerous online backup solutions that provide a fully-automated way of encrypting your data, then securely transmitting this data to an offsite facility. Implementing one of these systems can be much easier than upgrading your current in-house backup systems. This will also free up a lot of time by automating a time-consuming manual process.

If you haven’t given much thought to encrypting and automating your backups, this might be a good time to start.

About The Author:

Storagepipe Solutions makes a great, secure alternative to backup tapes by providing safer online backup and email archiving alternatives.

Update: Readwriteweb also recently commented on this case stating that "It's hard to steal a cloud"