Securing Remote Site Data

Securing data at remote sites has not been a major concern for corporations for many years. In the early 1990's technology was primarily run by fax machines and crude email communication methods. Most remote sites were connected via expensive telephone lines with dumb terminals that passed data back and forth to a central mini computer or mainframe. The actual amount of data at remote sites was very small. As the internet exploded in the late 1990's and computers dropped dramatically in price, computers started to proliferate throughout the organization. Email replaced faxes as the primary method of communication. Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office became a staple in every machine allowing employees to create documents and spreadsheets. All this remote data started to become important. Soon small servers arrived at these remote sites to supply a central point of storage and provide print access. IT now had to come up with ways to protect these computers.

Once the IT departments realized that data was exploding beyond their secured walls they had to come up with backup methods. What did they rely on? Good old tape. Tape has been in the IT environment for years and it was an easy decision to move a tape drive to the server at the remote site. The server could now act as a file server, a print server and a backup server. Disk capacity was still small. Data could be saved on single tape. This allowed backup agents to be placed on each of the workstations at the remote site and data could be sent to a single tape.