Re: Alternatives to Iron Mountain -- MIDRANGE-L

FWIW my day job is Senior Information Security Analyst and I do the
investigations of lost or stolen laptops, PDA, backup media, etc. I see
laptops stolen from cars that were just parked at a restaurant, parked
outside overnight, lost in taxis, lost and stolen at airports, etc. I've
also had a backup tape lost by UPS (it turned up later).

It's for reasons like this that Massachusetts is going to start mandating
encryption of anything portable that contains personal information. See
17.04 of
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=ocaterminal&L=4&L0=Home&L1=Consumer&L2=Privacy&L3=Identity+Theft&sid=Eoca&b=terminalcontent&f=reg201cmr17&csid=Eoca
This applies not only to Mass companies but to any company that stores PII
on a Mass citizen.

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Kirk Goins <kirkgoins@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sounds like Iron Mountain needs some training in 'Customer Service'...
While rolling your own may or may not be workable from a logistics point, I
does open the door to several liabilities. Let's assume a very trusted and
responsible employee is transporting your tapes to another of your
locations
on their way home from work. And something like..

Drives all the way home with the tapes, decides to leave the tapes in the
car overnight and for the first time ever the car is stolen or broken into.
The tapes are now gone. Now what are your legal exposure? What types of
data are on the tapes? Are they encrypted?

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 12:07 PM, <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We'll keep rolling our own in mind also. We have a plant reasonably far
enough away to be out of tornado path but not so far away as to make
fetching the tapes a hardship.

The problem is that budget cuts have been so severe that they've done

away

with couriers, company cars, and now even paying employees mileage

between

plants is one of the reasons that we've went with Iron Mountain. We have
one employee (and his son) who both drive separately by that plant and
they work in this department. But he's a former teamster and is pretty
honked at budget cuts. You start adding up mileage, time and stuff and
these other places don't look unreasonable. It's the service that was
galling us: "Thou shalt have someone key in a pin that we dropped
off/picked up tapes. This person shall forfeit lunch hour, get called

out

of company meetings and whatever it takes to key in the pin number

because

we will be there as we see fit."

Rob Berendt
--
Group Dekko Services, LLC
Dept 01.073
Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com

From:
John Jones <chianime@xxxxxxxxx>
To:
Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:
10/01/2009 02:48 PM
Subject:
Re: Alternatives to Iron Mountain
Sent by:
midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Recall would be one of IM's competitors, but as DR2 mentioned you can

roll

your own if you have multiple facilities. At a previous employer we had
multiple facilities around Chicago & the suburbs. We used a
grandfather/father/son strategy and rotated tapes from the data center to
facility A to B to C and then back to the DC.

I've also seen branch offices that simply use UPS to ship their tapes to
the
main office. As long as a speedy return of the tapes is not a priority
you
can do this if your company has multiple facilities but they aren't
geographically close.

Another option if you have a disaster recovery provider is to send your
offsite backups there. I'm sure there would be a fee but if you actually
had to start a recovery at least the media would be immediately

available.

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Don <dr2@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rob,

It may be a bit simplistic, but if all you're doing is offline backup

tape

and archival tape storage, go rent an environmentally controlled

storage

unit across town, put a big data safe in it and roll your own off site
schema. I know plenty that have done this and gotten rid of

organizations

like tin mountain, etc... Check around local locksmiths and office
furniture liquidators for used data safes (Schwab used to make a good

one

as
I recall) and do some cost analysis.

If you have a division in a separate building across town, have them

build

a
small "fireproof room" in it and slide your safe in there...

DR2

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 1:28 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Alternatives to Iron Mountain

Anyone using an offsite tape company? We're using Iron Mountain

however

we do not have a receptionist and they like to switch around their

arrival

time and it's getting hard to get someone in the department to forfeit
their lunch in case Iron Mountain may show up. We had an alternative

plan

where they were given access to a secured room to pick up or remove

tapes

and this worked well for awhile. Now they want us to key in some PIN
number - back to missing lunch. That's why we're looking at

alternatives.

Rob Berendt
--
Group Dekko Services, LLC
Dept 01.073
Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com

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--
JJ
"I'm in no condition to drive...Wait! I shouldn't listen to myself, I'm
drunk!"
- Homer J. Simpson
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