Comprehensive Report on Data Backup Security: Issues and Solutions

This report provides a detailed overview of the security issues associated with data backups, including damaged media, human error, software bugs, data corruption, and IT staff unavailability during recovery. It explores various methods for securing backup media, such as using tamper-evident seals, unique labels, date logging, and controlled access storage enclosures. The report also discusses off-site backup strategies, highlighting the use of magnetic tapes and disk drives, data encryption, compression, and secure transmission to off-site security centers, ensuring data accessibility in emergencies through data restore lines or the internet. Desklib offers a wide range of solved assignments and past papers for students.

Running head: SECURITY OF BACKUPS
SECURITY OF BACKUPS
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

1SECURITY OF BACKUPS
Issues of securing backups
Backups might face several issues, these issues are as follows
 Damaged target media like disk and tape that would require a time consuming and
costly service for data recovery.
 Human error in good formatting of backup or the overwriting of backup data.
 Files might get deleted accidentally or software bugs might get replicated to the
backup due to the process of remote monitoring.
 Backup data might get corrupted.
 During the time of restoration or recovery, IT staffs might not be available.
Security of backup media
Backup media can be secured using various ways, these ways are as follows
 All the individual media that contains backup media must be sealed with a tamper
evident and a label that is unique in nature.
 The media must be logged with date’s creation along with tamper evidence
including unique level (Palonen, 2017). Log should have two copies, one would
accompany the tape and another one would be kept by the person of authority.
This authority has no access to media that contains backup.
 The media that contains data must be kept in a specific enclosure that would be
locked and its access must be controlled.

2SECURITY OF BACKUPS
Off-site storage for backups
Offsite backup can be described as a backup process that helps in storing backup
applications or data external to enterprise or the IT environment. It uses offsite location as a
means to secure data. It uses magnetic tapes along with many more removable storage media.
Disk drives are the most popular among these because they are very convenient to use (Wang,
2015). It first encrypts the data and then compresses as well as transmitting it to the security
center that is located offsite. This information is accessible in terms of emergency by the usage
of a data restore line or by using internet.

3SECURITY OF BACKUPS
References
Palonen, M. (2017). Implementing a secure and regulation-compliant system for storing
healthcare data.
Wang, Y. (2015). Efficient and secure deduplication for cloud-based backups. Temple
University.