Many organizations are moving away from traditional backup solutions using tape and adopting “next-generation” backup systems using local appliances paired with Cloud storage. This improves restore times particularly for single or small numbers of files. So what do organizations do with their tape libraries if they are no longer using them for back-up? Using QStar’s Archive Manager to create a “Tape-as-Cloud” solution can provide many benefits, not least, improved levels of ransomware protection.

Tape-as-Cloud or Tape-based Object Storage creates an S3 compatible storage pool using tape media, either locally (on-prem) or remotely (as a user owned or third-party managed Cloud).  This can act as an organization’s alternative to Amazon’s Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive solutions, which offer retrieval times of minutes to hours – which would be the same as online or offline tape. The key benefit of a Tape-as-Cloud solution is no egress fees, complete knowledge of the location of your data and in-built ransomware protection for your archived data.

Tape media, whether rewritable or WORM, appends content and never overwrites. This means any time a ransomware attack is initiated it cannot destroy data, it has to append and write new versions of content to new tape media.  A Tape-as-Cloud solution (such as Archive Manager) can load older versions of the files / objects, rolling back the view of the archive to before the ransomware attack.

Many applications (such as Media and Entertainment Media Asset Managers, Healthcare PACS and VNA solutions or High Performance Computing) as well as many scale-out NAS systems, now offer an S3 API option to archive data after set periods of inactivity or based on a number of months or years after data creation.

Tape-as-Cloud can be used as a local Cloud or as part of a multi-Cloud solution.

For more information – please see our new White Paper