Why LTO technology is a vital solution for protecting enterprise data

It’s no secret that organizations are struggling to protect their data. The threats are legion, ranging from simple disk failures to complex cyberattacks. According to a 2024 survey conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of Backblaze, only 42% of businesses are able to recover all their data when they’ve experienced data loss.

Overcoming the challenges of protecting organizational data is a top priority for CIOs. Technology vendors are constantly developing new solutions to help them accomplish this goal, but none offer 100% protection. So long as data is connected to a network, it can be accidentally deleted, corrupted, or attacked.

There is, however, a bulwark that IT can use to provide a last line of defense, and while it’s not a novel technology, it is by no means outdated. Launched nearly 25 years ago, Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is a well-established magnetic tape data storage technology that has undergone continuous innovation. LTO is a cost-effective, easy-to-use technology that can play a key role in security, data protection and archiving applications.

Here are three ways LTO can strengthen any organization’s security and data protection posture:

• An air-gapped last line of defense: Ransomware attacks are a major concern for all organizations, and while CIOs would prefer to prevent such attacks from succeeding, when they do penetrate defenses, the ability to recover data quickly may be the only thing standing between the organization and financial ruin. It’s long been best practice to store at least one copy of data offsite, but many organizations have met this requirement by keeping backup data in the cloud — where it is still online and, thus, potentially vulnerable to attack. Tape is stored offline, so cyberattackers have no way to access the data.
• Rapid, cost-effective restore: LTO may take a minute or two longer than other storage media to access data, but when it comes to reading and writing, it is much quicker than disk. When an organization needs to restore a large amount of data, LTO’s read-write speed really shines.

  LTO is also cost-effective. A single, $100 LTO-9 cartridge can store 18TB of uncompressed data (45TB 2.5:1 compressed). Transferring huge amounts of data from the cloud is painstakingly slow in comparison, and the egress fees can be crushing.

  Plus, it’s easy to use. Modern robotic LTO libraries eliminate the need to physically insert and remove tapes. In fact, the management experience for LTO is not that much different from disk- or cloud-based systems.

• A durable data storage medium: Properly stored, an LTO cartridge can safely store data for three decades. Its durability is three orders of magnitude greater than disk, and it’s much less susceptible to failure or corruption. When it comes time to restore data after a disaster or an attack, no one wants to discover that the backups have gone bad. LTO provides a safe and reliable long-term medium for backup storage.

So don’t make the mistake of thinking LTO technology is too old to play a role in your data protection strategy. Nearly a quarter century of development has built LTO into a fundamental defense against data loss.

Learn more about LTO.