Gerard, 

I share your concern and focus on the lost tapes. 

I agree with all most all of the facts that you lay out but I have a 
different focus of worry on the cost.  You make a good case that the chances 
are slim that the data will fall into the wrong hands and be valuable to 
that thief. 

Nevertheless, the disclosure law presents a lop-sided cost to the business 
because now if a tape is permanently lost a business must disclose that loss 
and suffer the publicity.  There don't seem to be any follow up studies on 
what the total loss was to the people whose personal data was lost. 

I wonder if the publicity came about because of the disclosure law that 
forced these incidents into the news.  Without them I think that it would 
have been easy to assess the liklihood of financial loss as low and 
certainly far lower than the cost of telling everyone what had happened.  If 
disclosure brought the publicity then perhaps this has been an unreported 
and unnoticed problem. 

 


Gerard J. Nicol writes: 

> Bill, 
> 
> What you say is absolutely correct. 
> 
> The only issue is that the main risk here is not the problems caused by data
> falling into the wrong hands; it is data being lost in the first place. 
> 
> The fact is that the chances of extracting meaningful information from lost
> tapes are slim irrespective of encryption. 
> 
> To make anything of the data you would have to: 
> 
> (1) Have an appropriate tape drive
> (2) Establish how the data was backed up
> (3) Establish the format of the data 
> 
> This is all completely doable, but you would first require a motive, the
> skills and have to establish that it was the best way of obtaining your
> goal. 
> 
> Your comments about perfection are also relative to the ways in which the
> data is being lost. 
> 
> I have been told that in the courier business (your common garden variety
> courier) they see one errant delivery in every 20 as the benchmark. 
> 
> A good offsite tape vendor should be looking at a target of no more than one
> errant delivery in every 5000 deliveries. 
> 
> Now, that one in every 5000 figure is for errant tapes, not lost tapes. 
> 
> From my experience it is very rare to actually completely lose a tape
> volume. This is what concerns me about the recent publicized "glitches" in
> the industry; they have all been permanent losses. 
> 
> I think you will find that if you scratch the surface these losses are part
> of a larger problem that for some providers start in their own facilities. 
> 
> I think if you asked most providers how many tapes they had in their
> facilities they would not even know. They should be able to tell you down to
> the tape. i.e. I have 1,003,001 tapes. 
> 
> Gerard 
> 
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