77 Terabytes of lost survey data call attention to the fact that the enemy could also be indoors
In a world marked by the increasing number of ransomware attacks, it is still a surprise (the most unpleasant) to learn that around 34 million Kyoto University research files were lost due to a failure in the backup process, which accidentally deleted a huge amount of data, much of it unrecoverable.
The reason was a flaw in an update intended to delete old and unnecessary files from the University's supercomputer and which ended up wiping over the course of two days (between December 14th and 16th last year) 77TB of critical data from ongoing research, stored on a high-capacity disk.
In the view of Florian Malecki, head of global marketing at Arcserve, the world's most experienced ransomware-fighting and data protection solutions provider, “It's not just sophisticated malware attacks that bring systems down. Technology fails. People make mistakes. Mother nature is unpredictable. A proper data backup strategy provides the resilience needed to recover from all these variables. Unfortunately, too many organizations are saving important data in one place.”
For the executive, the episode makes clear the need to adopt a robust and coherent backup strategy by all those who have sensitive information. “The forever loss of important research data makes it clear that there is no longer room for a simplistic view of the backup process. It must be done not only regularly, but also as an integral part of a data protection strategy.”
For Florian Malecki, when making a comprehensive reading of the data copying process, it is evident the need to eliminate all possible foci of failures, whether human, software, hardware or even those caused by cybercriminals. “The 77 TB of precious data could have been preserved if the institution had adopted the backup strategy that is currently the most recommended by experts, which consists of generating three backup copies to be stored on two different media, such as disk or tape”, analyzes Florian.
The expert adds that as one of these copies employs immutable storage and is located off-site in the event of an eventual disaster, data integrity is guaranteed, both in the case of criminal actions and in failures that are always likely to occur, as this incident proves. “The adoption of a logical and coherent data protection strategy has backup as one of its central pieces and can avoid immeasurable losses such as those suffered by the University of Kyoto”, concludes Florian Malecki.
