LTO technology: One of the most enduring – and most effective – ways to protect your data from cybercrime

Ransomware has long been one of the kinds of cyberattacks that CIOs fear most, in part because it has become so common. With ransomware, it’s not a question of whether a company will be attacked, but when. And since the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, cybercriminals have been able to leverage generative AI to launch highly sophisticated attacks at scale. In fact, the number of ransomware attacks has grown 76% since then, according to a 2024 Accenture report. The average cost of a successful breach has also been staggering, reaching an incredible$4.45 million in 2023, according to IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach” report.

Security vendors have responded with a wide array of protections. While a multilayered, defense-in-depth strategy is a strong one, so long as data is online, cybercriminals will eventually find a way to access it — especially now that AI-powered tools are part of their arsenal. Backup has been rightfully touted as the last line of defense against ransomware, but if those backups are stored on a network, either on-premises or even a hyperscale cloud, the latest ransomware packages are designed to seek out and destroy them.

There’s only one surefire way to protect backup data from a ransomware attack, and that’s to create an air gap. Data that isn’t connected to any network can’t be compromised by ransomware, because there’s no way for cybercriminals to access it electronically. In fact, the old 3-2-1 maxim for data protection — three copies of data on two different storage mediums, with one offsite — now has a couple of extra digits. The new maxim, 3-2-1-1-0, requires organizations to keep one copy offline and that each backup contains zero errors.

For decades, magnetic tape has been the storage medium CIOs have relied on for backups Though tape may seem like an antiquated technology in our always-online age, innovation never stood still, especially for Linear Tape-Open (LTO). Originally launched in 2000, LTO provides huge storage density for applications such as long-term data retention and archiving, data backup, data offloading, and offline storage. Thanks to the continuous development of LTO’s capabilities, the technology has grown into a low-cost, high capacity, reliable, portable, and secure solution for data protection. LTO complements disk, flash, and cloud solutions in tiered storage architecture.

The air gap isn’t the only advantage LTO has over other kinds of backup storage systems. While it is quicker to access data stored on a disk, LTO is far faster at reading and writing data. If you’ve been hit by a ransomware attack, chances are you’ll need to recover large amounts of data. That extra minute or two spent accessing data won’t make much of a difference during recovery, but the faster read-write speed certainly will, especially if you compare LTO to the cloud. Transferring data from the cloud to an on-premises location can be extremely slow — and the size of the bill from all those egress charges might just make you wish you’d paid the ransom instead.

Far from a relic, LTO is a modern technology that’s easy to use, affordable (about $100 per cartridge), and impregnable to ransomware attack.

Learn how you can take advantage of LTO to provide a solid last line of defense.