SEPATON Announces Secure Erasure to Erase Virtual Tape Cartridges

SEPATON, a provider of enterprise-class disk-based data protection solutions, announced the availability of Secure Erasure, a licensed option for SEPATON's S2100-ES2 data protection systems providing guaranteed, auditable erasure of information on virtual tape cartridges.

"Secure Erasure enables storage administrators to schedule all or selected cartridges for a total data overwrite with National Institute of Standards and Technology or "NIST" approved data pattern for clearing or purging low, medium and high sensitivity data to ensure that no data can be retrieved from those tape cartridges," company officials said.

Organizations using Secure Erasure can meet their legal and regulatory compliance obligations or limited retention time periods of customer data and protection of personally identifiable, confidential or secret data. For ease of use, Secure Erasure tape selection, scheduling and reporting is integrated with SEPATON's graphical user interface. 

No manual steps are required to remove, reinsert, or transfer media; and an audit report is generated for each cartridge and emailed to the auditor automatically. Unlike physical tape, virtual tape cartridges are useable after the data is overwritten and they are available within minutes after the data overwriting process begins.

In government agencies where mandatory security labeling and information compartmentalization are common, there are also occasional Classified Message Incidents or "CMI" where a high level classified email is accidentally sent to a user with a lower classification. The security response involves purging that email and any backups that may have been made of the information.

In financial or healthcare settings, occasional mistakes occur where credit card or personal information is copied to a system not classified to protect that information. In the physical tape world, the backup tapes would be shredded. In the virtual tape world, the information must be securely erased over the entire length of the virtual tape.

Michael Myers, director, new business, Eagle Alliance, says SEPATON's new Secure Erasure option can be used to guarantee that storage resources allocated for backup/recovery can be completely erased and reused without fear of data contamination, which will allow managing cloud resources securely for multiple tenants. 

The secure deletion of data is a key component for companies to successfully implement a true Data Protection Lifecycle Management solution. Data center managers can leverage SEPATON's content aware intelligence to efficiently backup, de-duplicate, replicate, report and manage the information assets of their enterprise for business success, according to company officials.

 

In April SEPATON demonstrated support for Symantec's (News - Alert) NetBackup OpenStorage or "OST" application programming interface or "API" with its S2100-ES2 virtual tape library and DeltaStor deduplication software.