Now you can be sure to meet your IT Governance, Risk & Compliance Requirements!

Tape Audit Tool for Spectrum Protect is an easy to use web-application that provides automation of the auditing process, it verifies data is readable and usable by the application in order to validate retention compliance.

The Challenge

Businesses that need to comply with IT Governance and business data retention requirements are faced with the task of verification of the quality of archived data.  This task is necessary in order to ensure the data is readable and usable by the applications when the situation of an inspection arises.

Backup and Archive Tape hardware tests do not ensure whether the application could actually read the data. Changed data can be physically readable, but it could be logically corrupted!

Introduction

The Tape Audit Tool offers the automation needed to perform the auditing of short term or long term retention data to verify the quality of the data and ensure it’s readability and integrity.  This feature provides a reliable statement as to whether the application is or not able to read the data correctly.

You can be sure to comply with all required standards and guidelines for data retention; minimize risks of data loss in cases of corrupted data, cybercrime attacks and many other situations by ensuring quality of data over extended period of time.

The “Tape Audit Tool” integrates with Spectrum Protect to provide front-end user interface with automation to setup, run and schedule tape audit verification jobs. It is installed together with a BA client and communicates directly with the defined Spectrum Protect servers, and has its own database; which allows the creation of reports and long-term statistics. Operation is via a user-friendly WEB GUI.

Why Tape Audit Tool?

A hardware-based solution only knows the physical VOLSER of a tape: instead, the Tape Audit Tool allows you to perform a wide type of tests to the stored data (based on application-specific features), this expands the possible test types which are not achievable when performing physical tests.

Requirements

Requirements To Minimise Risk For The Company

A number of standards and guidelines require from every company to minimize the risk of data loss and ensure data availability over extended periods of time. This includes, among other things:

  • ISO27001 – ISMS Certification
  • BSI – Basic protection catalogue
  • GoBD – Fundamentals of proper accounting and data access
  • MaRisk – Minimum requirements for risk management (BaFin)

Technical requirements:

  • Current IBM Spectrum Protect Server Version
  • Windows/Linux OS with BA-Client Support and JRE 1.8
  • AIX

Tape Audit Tool features

  • Easy to use Web GUI with a simple overview of current processes, informative displays and job control elements.

  • Control and monitoring of Tape legibility on Hardware, Data Level and test jobs

  • Periodic checks of legibility, readability and usability of Tapes using IBM Spectrum Protect features and agents

  • Tape Checks and Media selection for testing of corrupted data, based on multiple criteria

  • Create Reports/Evidence, either automatically or on demand

  • Data Corruption Alerts

Your benefits

Verify long-term retention data is readable to meet retention compliance: A hardware-based solution only knows the physical VOLSER of a tape and has no information about the data stored on it; therefore, a pure check from the hardware’s point of view does not guarantee that the application can actually read the data. Changed, but physically readable data is not recognized. Tape Audit Tool will verify that the data writen by an application can be read in the future.

Automate the scheduling of audit jobs based on various criteria: The Tape Audit Tool offers the possibility to select the frequency, schedule of audit processing and the ability to select audit based on age of tape, particular server or particular storage pool.

The “Spectrum Protect Tape Audit Tool” does not require any hardware: The software is installed as an appliance in a virtualized server.