Without question, carefully planned and executed backup procedures are critical to every business. Data loss can mean the loss of accounts receivable, pending sales, and customer loyalty. As evidence of data loss devastation, 90% of all companies that experience data loss because of disaster are out of business within two years, and nearly 50% never reopen their doors at all(1).

In addition to the importance of data protection to ensure business preservation, recent corporate misbehavior has led the government to require the protection and retention of detailed business records. Over 10,000 state and federal regulations deal with the retention of records(2), across almost every industry.

Yet, despite the consequences of a poor backup strategy, surveys reveal disturbing statistics about data restoration events. The Gartner Group reports that 40 to 50% of all backups are not recoverable in full, and that 60% of all backups fail in general(3). Even in large enterprise data centers, nearly one quarter of respondents report that 20% or more of their tape-based recoveries fail(4).

Numerous surveys reveal that second to misconfiguration of the backup software, the leading cause of backup failure is human error(5). As a monotonous, thankless job, the shuttling of tapes in and out of a backup tape drive is frequently delegated to employees without the benefit of professional training, who perform the task as their lowest priority on the way out the door. Minimizing the dependence on human intervention by consolidating the tape loading effort reduces the risk of human error by 80%, and proportionately increases the overall reliability of the backup process.

Eliminating the daily insertion and removal of backup tapes by implementing robotic tape automation systems is the key to eliminating the risk of human error from the data backup process. Although standard in large scale IT operations and data centers, tape automation systems are uncommon in small to medium-sized businesses. A 2004 Exabyte survey reveals that 70% of small to medium-sized businesses recognize the need for a tape automation system but forgo implementation because it is cost prohibitive.

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1 University of Texas, Center for Research on Information Systems, 1994 Survey 2 Compliance: The effect on information management and the storage industry, May 2003, Peter A. Gerr, Brian Babineau and Patrick C. Gordon, The Enterprise Storage Group. 3 Gartner Group, January 2002, Adam Couture 4 Enterprise Storage Group, "The Evolution of Enterprise Data Protection", January 2004 5 DM Direct Newsletter, DM Review, January 14, 2000, Drew Rob