Fire in the hole! FIRE IN THE HOLE!!

While these recent fires aren't directly  "data related", they do involve the destruction of millions of information assets belonging to a vast number of organizations.  And these aren't the first incidents of this type to take place in the past 10 years. In fact, these aren't even the first incidents to take place for this same vendor in the past 10 years.

This vendor has also been involved in the loss of data in the past couple of years, and they're pretty high profile cases, some of which I know you're all familiar with.

What's interesting is the similarity in which individuals are electing to respond to the losses.  In the data losses, which involved the loss of tapes (backup tapes) being sent to commercial offsite storage facilities, the vendor who lost the tapes said the clients should have had the tapes encrypted or they should have instead been using a service they provide for transmitting the data and storing it electronically rather than sending physical tapes for storage.  In other words, it wasn't their faul ... it was the client's fault for establishing a contract with them to provide a service they were unable to effectively do. Instead, they should have contracted with them for ANOTHER service!

In these recent losses, in one case a fire started because a workman was on the roof of the facility and hot solder (or slag) burned through the roof, onto the floor and started a fire that resulted in the loss of 3% of the holdings and damaged an unknown amount (water and smoke exposure) during the fighting of the fire.  Had the  service provider been aware of the work going on, they could have stationed employees to watch the area being worked on and likely the fire would have never occurred, much less would any records have been lost or damaged.  In the second case, the early comments from the providers spokesperson attempted to discount the value of the records being stored as "archived, inactive business records", an attempt to minimize the loss.  The facility has been referred to as a "…modern records centre with fire detection and sprinkler systems…", but there was no indication that the facility was either compartmented or had firewalls to break the holdings into smaller portions in an attempt to minimize the loss and damage to the holdings.  

Past fires (Iron Mountain in New Jersey, Brambles in Illinois, Diversified in Pennsylvania) have all shown that using construction techniques such as those called out in NFPA 232, the "Standard for the Protection of Records" to limit the volume of records to 250,000CF in any one compartment and to use 4-hour firewalls to stop the spread of both fire and water and smoke damage to other holdings are prudent, and recent studies and tests performed by the NFPA Research Foundation (Record Storage Compartmentation Study) also support this as a logical method to stop the spread of fire in a records warehouse-type environment.

So what will the next recommendation be?  Save everything on fireproof paper?  Store it somewhere that provides adequate protection and attempts to limit the damage?   Or convert everything to electronic images and transmit it electronically for storage so you adequately protect yourself?

Are those who fail to learn from  history doomed to repeat it?  Let's hope not.