Tape Ark® Partner Resource Hub, For AWS Sellers

Why this matters:

Organizations often retain data for many years to meet operational, legal, regulatory, or business requirements. As tape infrastructure ages:

• Data accessibility becomes increasingly difficult
• Legacy hardware becomes unsupported and harder to source
• Recovery times become slower and less predictable
• Business continuity risks increase
• Historical data becomes difficult to leverage for analytics, AI, and modernization initiatives

To avoid data becoming inaccessible, organizations need a strategy to migrate legacy tape data into modern, cloud-based platforms where it can be securely retained, accessed, and used to support future business initiatives.

Data stored on tape cannot easily support modern AI, analytics, or search initiatives until it is liberated from legacy infrastructure.

Deeper details. Tape warranties typically only replace the physical media, not the data stored on it. If a tape fails:

• Critical business records may become unrecoverable
• eDiscovery or audit timelines may be missed
• Compliance risks may increase
• Recovery efforts can become expensive and time consuming

There is no modern durability guarantee for ageing tape media. AWS offers enterprise-grade durability designed to significantly reduce the risk of data loss.

🔗Further reading: Magnetic tape deterioration

Legacy tape environments often make it difficult to:

• Identify what data exists
• Apply appropriate retention policies
• Respond quickly to audits or legal requests
• Enforce defensible deletion policies
• Demonstrate governance and compliance controls

Keeping data you need to retain, and removing data you are legally required to no longer retain is almost impossible when data is on tape.  A single tape can have data you need to both retain and remove and liberation of this data is the only way to achieve that result.

Migrating tape data into modern cloud environments improves visibility, governance, accessibility, and policy management.

Deeper details. Deleting a file in backup software does not remove it from tape. This creates:

• Over-retention of information
• Legal exposure during audits or Right-to-Be-Forgotten requests
• Increased breach surface area

Technically all of the data written to tape is accessible until that whole tape is destroyed, meaning most organizations are never able to get in compliance!

🔗Further reading: National Institute of Standards and Technology Data Sanitization

Organizations managing tape environments often face hidden operational costs, including:

• Long retention = compounding storage costs with no added value
• Offsite tape vendors increase pricing every year by CPI, as well as inflation, tariffs and logistics
• Budgets under constant scrutiny
• Long term retention often means retaining multiple legacy tape drive and software systems, along with data center space dedicated to the tape restore function, the cloud eliminates this
• Offsite storage providers charge per tape, irrespective of how much data is on it

Modern cloud storage models can help reduce these costs while improving scalability, accessibility, and operational efficiency.

Because our solution is charged by data volume, you pay for what you use, not just for shelf space in an air-conditioned room. This allows you to finally get off the ever increasing cost of tape vault storage.

Deeper details. A CEO from a global offsite tape vault provider publicly acknowledged benefiting from inflation-driven pricing increases—without corresponding service improvements.

Cloud economics shift costs from:

• Per-tape → per-GB
• Fixed logistics → elastic consumption
• CapEx-heavy → OpEx-friendly

🔗Further reading: Tech CEO admits praying inflation

Physical storage depends on petrochemical-derived media, grid-powered vault facilities (which may include fossil fuel energy depending on location), and routine logistics operations involving fossil-fuel-powered transport.

Modernizing tape environments can support broader sustainability initiatives by:

• Reducing physical infrastructure requirements
• Minimizing transportation and logistics dependencies
• Improving energy efficiency
• Consolidating legacy environments into modern cloud platforms

The cloud offers instant access, uses renewable energy, and eliminates unnecessary courier vans on the road.

Deeper details. Major tape storage vendors admit they are decades away from carbon neutrality, still relying on:

• Diesel transport
• Physical handling
• Manual logistics
• Extensive cooling and electricity consumption from non-renewable sources

In addition, breaking away from tape, means that tape manufacturers use less petrochemical originated plastics to manufacture every tape.  In fact over 95% of a tape is not recyclable due to the contaminated plastics used in the manufacturing process.

🔗Further reading: Amazon Web Services sustainability 

Acknowledge: Retaining archived tape data in the cloud is often more cost effective and unlocks a range of capabilities.

Reframe: Moving tape libraries into the cloud will optimize data retention management, data restore SLAs, and provide greater visibility.

➡️Redirect: Tape Ark is more cost-effective and offers substantial additional value.

The Risks Of Using Offsite Storage Providers

Recent industry incidents (media articles linked below) have highlighted the operational risks associated with physical tape transportation and offsite storage, including:

• Media lost in transit
• Tapes stolen during transportation
• Environmental damage from fires or flooding
• Handling errors causing data loss or media degradation
• Extended recovery timelines during critical events

When data leaves direct organizational control, so does operational certainty. Organizations should carefully evaluate whether physical tape transportation and offsite storage continue to align with their security, governance, and business continuity objectives.

Is your customer prepared to accept that level of risk?

1. Backup tapes containing data on approximately 600,000 employees were reported lost during offsite storage handling. The investigation involved federal authorities.
2. Backup tapes containing sensitive customer data were lost while being transported to an offsite tape storage facility.
3. A box of backup tapes containing sensitive customer information was lost during shipment by a third-party courier.
   
4. Backup tapes containing personal data of approximately 1.2 million federal employees were lost by a courier during shipment.
5. Backup tapes were stolen from a courier’s parked truck while being transported to offsite storage.
6. Backup tapes containing 2.2 million patient billing records were stolen from a courier’s car after protocol violations.
7. Multiple fires at a storage facilities destroyed large volumes of archived corporate records, raising concerns about offsite storage resilience.
8. Over 5,000 backup tapes were damaged due to sprinkler system contamination and improper freeze/thaw handling, requiring specialized recovery.

Acknowledge: Common in many organizations, where tape costs are often buried across departments.

Reframe: When factoring in:

• Offsite storage
• Compliance overhead
• Hardware support risk
• Audit response time
• Legacy backup licensing
• Data centre costs to maintain aging hardware for older tapes
• Software licensing to maintain access

The true cost of tape is often significantly higher.

➡️Redirect: Tape Ark supports organizations with a full TCO assessment. Data liberation can be done without upfront charges and sellers should highlight the hidden costs of offsite storage that they pay to maintain a tape restore capability.

🔗Further reading: Storing Tapes In Offsite Storage Because You Think It’s Cheaper?

Acknowledge. Very common for enterprise and government organizations with decades of accumulated data.

Reframe. Unknown data = unknown risk.
Auditors, litigators, or regulators will eventually ask.

➡️Redirect. The Tape Ark Comprehensive Media Audit provides low-cost visibility into:

• What data exists
• How old it is
• What risk it represents
• The potential for major compliance and data retention issue for the provider
• The audit can help you determine if a major data discovery issue is waiting to be uncovered in your data

Acknowledge. This is typical in IT modernization journeys. Low access does not mean low risk.

Reframe. Older tape collections benefit most from cloud migration due to the lower storage capacity of the older tapes and the cost per-GB pricing on AWS. The fact that they often contain the history of the company means they can be used in GenAI for LLMs etc.

Even infrequently accessed data can create risk if it becomes inaccessible when needed for legal, audit, compliance, operational, or business continuity purposes.  Cloud migration transforms this from dead data into governed data, allowing all data (both tape and cloud) to be managed in one location.  No more tape hardware, data centre space, power, cooling, software licences, and tape management costs.

➡️Redirect. Compare offsite tape storage vs cloud storage (per GB) and ingest costs with Tape Ark’s funded remote audit service and TCO calculation.

Acknowledge: Yes the movement of thousands of tapes can feel daunting however Tape Ark has an end-to-end management plan that will make the transition simple.

Reframe: Proven global ingest process. Phase, managed transition.

➡️Redirect: Tape Ark provides an end-to-end service that takes the workload off your customers’ hands. Tape Ark will liaise with the offsite storage provider and manage the end-to-end transport and ingest of the customer’s media with little to no assistance from the customer’s operations team.

Acknowledge: Some customers get concerned about how they can do a restore while the tapes are in the possession of Tape Ark, but rapid access to your data is part of our service offering.

Reframe: Managed logistics, minimal operational impact.

➡️Redirect: Tape Ark can provide rapid access to data during the ingest process ensuring that there is no disruption to the customers restore requirements.

Acknowledge: The security of all data is critical and well understood by Tape Ark, but your customer should consider whether an offsite provider is lower risk.

Reframe:  Tape Ark uses secure, controlled migration processes designed to protect sensitive and mission-critical information throughout the migration lifecycle.

➡️Redirect: We recommend you share the media links featured in the section The Risks of Using Offsite Storage Providers with your customer to ensure they understand that the “do-nothing” action plan is likely more risky.

Acknowledge: AWS and Tape Ark both understand the criticality of sensitive information and regulated data, and the nature of security required to maintain it.

Reframe: AWS-aligned governance and encryption.

➡️Redirect: When using AWS instead of physical tape storage you get the benefits of AWS’s security technology, no physical access to the customer’s hardware or tapes, and end-to-end encryption during ingest to their AWS account.

Acknowledge: AWS and Tape Ark recognize that the customer’s time is precious.

Reframe: Low seller lift. Tape Ark carries execution

➡️Redirect: Aside from the initial effort to close the customer’s offsite account, most workloads happen without the organization’s involvement until it comes time for hand-over training on how to manage restores from a virtual environment or cloud repository.

🔗Further reading: Digitising Mass Legacy Tapes Doesn’t Take As Long As You Think