=> On Thu, 12 Oct 2000 11:38:37 -0400, "Remeta, Mark" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> If the tape is unreadable, you might as well throw it in the garbage and
> hope you have another copy!
And hope you have no garbage snoopers.
The thing that is missing from this discussion is an understanding of the
different standards to which our various installations are held.
Some of us back up hundreds of workstations, each of which holds relatively
trivial data. If someone were interested in attacking our security to get at
this data, it would be ridiculous to pay people to attemtpt to decode or
reverse-engineer the structure of an ADSM backup tape.
Some of us back up financial databases. It might be worth spending $300K (and
$500K hush-money) to get some black hats to decode a tape with identifying
data for fifty thousand platinum card customers.
It might be worth that much to get at President Clinton's PDA backups. Even a
legitimate press outfit might find the ROI worth it there.
Some of us back up data with statutory requirements for certain levels of
security. If I tossed out a tape of student records, my dilligence in
discarging stautory duties might justifiably be questioned. Forget cash
value, that's my _JOB_ ;)
For people with more rigorous requirements in security, the difference between
"This data is encrypted" and "This data is supplied without any table of
contents" is important indeed.
To us as *SM admins, the relative value of that tape is probably its lowest:
Unless we're already trying to do a recovery, we'll just re-run the backup,
recover the tape, re-run the BACKUP STGPOOL, whatever.
- Allen S. Rout
- Genuine encryption sold here. Accept no substitutes.
