Press Release (U.S.)

Lost Tape Incidents Highlight Value of Asigra Televaulting for Optimal Level of Data Security and Compliance

TORONTO – February 28, 2006 – For millions of unwary consumers, 2005 ended the same way it began: with major corporations reporting the loss of data backup tapes, potentially compromising customers’ most private personal and financial information. The costs of tape loss can climb into hundreds of millions of dollars, but those data disasters could have been avoided with an advanced disk-to-disk backup technology that eliminates tapes altogether, according to Asigra™, the technology specialists in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing.

Starting in February 2005, Bank of America, Citibank and other high-profile corporations suffered an embarrassing and potentially costly series of lost tape incidents that exposed customers’ data to misuse and exposed the companies to legal liability. The year concluded with more of the same when Marriott Corp. revealed in December that a backup tape was missing containing the Social Security numbers and other personal data of more than 200,000 employees and customers, and a mortgage subsidiary of LaSalle Bank Corp. reported that it had lost a backup tape with information on two million customers.

According to Bank Systems & Technology magazine, the loss of a single tape could cost Citibank and other companies millions of dollars. Because the tapes were not encrypted, Citibank was liable under the terms of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to notify each customer about the potential security breach, a process which the magazine estimates at $30 to $50 per customer. In the case of Citibank, the lost tape contained 3.9 million customer records, so that notification alone is likely to cost the company from $135 million to $195 million. Any legal action by customers could easily add hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to the total damage to the company.

“Mission-critical data that goes missing could result in legal liabilities and regulatory compliance violations – an intolerable situation,” said Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “One would expect that security-conscious organizations would include tape encryption as a standard security defense. Unfortunately, this hypothesis simply isn't true. In a survey of 388 storage professionals, ESG found that only 7% of users reported that they always encrypt their backup data while 60% said that they never do. There will likely be many more instances of lost tapes, which may lead to embarrassing public disclosures and expensive notification efforts.”

For decades, corporate data had been protected by backing up to tape and then removing these tapes to an off-site location, where they are stored in perpetuity. Few questioned the safety of this strategy until recently, when incidents of tape loss and information theft became more widely reported. At the same time, advances in network technology have allowed greater amounts of data to be moved over distances electronically instead of physically, an approach espoused by Asigra, a leader in backup and recovery for network computing.

While tape backup of corporate data at a data center carries some risk, remote offices / branch offices (ROBOs) carry a significantly higher risk. Tapes become increasingly hard to manage, tapes are picked up at different locations with the risk of loss and even if tapes are securely stored – there’s a risk that the tape can’t be read upon retrieval.

Even Citibank has learned its lesson. Following the embarrassment of the lost tape incident last year, the company announced that it would adopt a backup model for sending its data electronically in encrypted format, which is what Asigra has been known for for 20 years.

“Companies often think of tape backup as the de facto method of storing their mission-critical information over the long term, but the reality is that tape backup is a cumbersome process that has become a serious liability,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “Instead of safeguarding this very personal and sensitive information, the process of backing up to tape opens huge security gaps that are difficult and expensive to manage. Asigra has eliminated these inherent risks in backup and archiving by ensuring the maximum level of data security and compliance.”

Asigra Televaulting™ eliminates the costs, complexity and security issues related to tape-based backup with an agentless ROBO backup/recovery software package that avoids lost or stolen tapes by sending encrypted backup data electronically to a centralized site, eliminating tapes completely from remote backup operations. Asigra combines utility service provisioning with a disk-based, WAN-optimized architecture to shatter the limitations of traditional distributed backup software. Asigra eliminates many storage pain points through technology that is designed to protect remote offices and store their data at an offsite vault location, often at the corporate data center. Business benefits that differentiate Asigra’s offering from other backup solutions include a reduction in worldwide IT management expenditures, compounded reduction of hardware/software capital and enterprise-wide license costs, a pay-as-you-grow pricing model and the highest level of assurance that all company data is securely protected offsite.

The Asigra backup model has rapidly gained attention and momentum among corporate users and service providers. Asigra recently announced that backup service providers have reported 140% increases in data under management by Asigra's Televaulting product during the first 10 months of 2005, as compared with figures for the entire 12 months of 2004. TechTarget’s Storage magazine has also named Asigra Televaulting as one of the “Hot Technologies of 2006.”

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office online backup/recovery with more than three petabytes of data under protection. Since 1986, the company’s agentless Televaulting solution has centralized data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses state, Federal and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data center. Data is encrypted both “in-flight” over the WAN and “at rest.” Televaulting is offered by leading resellers and service providers worldwide including HP and DS3 DataVaulting to deliver highly secure data protection. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located globally. For more information visit www.asigra.com.