adam's notes

Protecting Data

Second to safety of personnel is data.

Primary way to protect data is by encrypting it.

  • Encryption alone isn’t sufficient
    • doesn’t protect against physical conditions

Physical Concerns for Data

Adverse physical conditions can harm the integrity of physical media.

  • E.g., temperature changes, humidity, magnetic fields, electricity, and physical impact
  • Types of media have different strengths and weaknesses

Magnetic media uses a combination of movement and magnetically sensitive material to record data.

  • E.g., hard drives, tapes, and floppy disks
  • Strong magnetic fields can harm the integrity of data stored on magnetic media
    • especially if the media lacks any metal casing, like magnetic tapes
  • jolting magnetic media while it’s in motion (being read from or written to) can render the media unusable

Flash media, or media that stores data on nonvolatile memory chips

  • Will last long if you:
    • avoid impacts that crush the chip
    • protect chips from electrical shocks
  • not terribly sensitive to temperature
  • often survive brief immersion in liquid. if properly dried
  • Some flash drives are designed specifically to survive extreme conditions

Optical media is fragile, as anyone with a small child can attest to.

  • E.g., CDs and DVDs
  • small scratches on the surface of the media may render it unusable
  • highly temperature sensitive
    • constructed of plastic and thin metal foil

Accessibility of Data

Not only do you have to protect the physical integrity of your data, you must also ensure that the data is available when you need to access it.

  • both equipment and facilities must remain in functioning condition and data must be usable

To ensure availability of data:

  • back up the data itself and the equipment and infrastructure used to provide access to the data
  • Use redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID),or RAID array, in a variety of configurations for your backups
  • Replicate data from one machine to another over a network or make copies of data onto backup storage media

Residual Data

On the flipside of being able to access data when you need it, you must be able to render data inaccessible when you no longer need it.

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