Best Practices for Securing IP-based Storage

As organizations face increasing regulatory requirements to protect key business and customer information, encryption of data while in motion on networks is becoming more important. Almost every week there is another report in the news about sensitive customer data being misplaced, exposed during data transfers or simply lost. The initial response was to encrypt data on tape, but this may not be enough. Simply put, businesses spend over two billion dollars a year to perform tape backups. There has to be a better way for businesses to move data from location to location, guarantee that the data gets there, and ensure that it is secure to meet requirements for business continuity, disaster recovery, compliance and security. Leading security-conscious compliance experts are taking the next step¾moving away from sending tapes from one location to another.

The move away from sending tapes from location to location coincides with the convergence of backup and data replication. With this convergence, continuous data protection architectures that move data over networks are being deployed to protect against tape loss, storage infrastructure failure, malicious attack, data corruption and accidental deletion. The most important part of this solution is that when data is moved over networks, it can be secured very easily using IPSec. This white paper covers risks to electronic data transfers, defined best practices, and the preferred solution for protecting data when it is in motion.