The rise of AI has had a seismic impact on the digital threat landscape—but its implications for data storage and retention are often overlooked. Modern organizations are collecting, retaining, and leveraging more data than ever to train their large language models (LLMs), and this raises important questions about how that potentially sensitive information is being stored and protected. But with cloud storage costs growing and new cybersecurity threats emerging with each passing day, organizations need an affordable long-term storage solution that provides the necessary degree of security and accessibility. Fortunately, there’s already a solution that fits the bill.
Tape has emerged (or, rather, re-emerged) as an attractive option for organizations seeking to store, leverage, and secure the large amounts of data. Many organizations are surprised to learn that tape continues to play an important role in today’s increasingly digital data storage landscape, but the truth is that tape has come a long way over the past several decades. Once thought of as “the place data goes to die,” today’s tape solutions have proven that tape can be convenient and accessible in addition to being secure and affordable. That balance of accessibility and protection has made tape an invaluable asset for organizations seeking to effectively train LLM solutions in a secure and responsible manner.
Why tape continues to play a prominent role
Tape is a highly compelling technology that plays an important role in today’s data storage infrastructure, but many businesses may not realize it. If you haven’t paid close attention to the tape market, you might not realize that tape has been continuously innovating for decades, and today’s solutions bring unique storage benefits that are not subject to the same supply chain pressures and disruptions that affect hard disk drives and flash. Still, misconceptions remain: because tape is a physical medium, organizations often imagine dusty reels being manually plugged into data drives. But today’s technology has evolved considerably—in fact, a modern LTO tape cartridge is just the size of a deck of cards. Modern hybrid deployments allow organizations to combine tape and cloud storage solutions enabling them to quickly shift data between cold and active storage as needed.
This is particularly important at a time when organizations are using LLMs in highly transformational ways. These businesses are urgently looking for ways to leverage the technology to boost productivity, surface and share knowledge internally, and directly impact and accelerate their goals, but they need data to do it. Research shows poor data quality is among the most common reasons AI initiatives fail, which means high-quality data sets and strong data integration are key priorities. That means modern businesses are storing more data than ever, but the supply shortages and increasing storage costs caused by growing data center demand mean storing all of that data on hard drives may not be feasible.
Herein lies the value of tape. The advantage of disk storage is that it allows for fast random read access to data, but most of the raw data used as the starting point for LLM development does not need to be accessed as individual files or objects. That is not the purpose of a data lake. This means there is little reason to store this “cold” or “frozen” data on more costly storage media, like disk or flash, or in the cloud where egressing large data sets can take a very long time (while incurring additional charges and requiring costly upfront commitments). The innate write limitations of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology and the way write speeds drop when streaming large contiguous data sets to an HDD due to the HDD cache becoming full also create unwelcome limitations.
Instead, organizations are turning to tape, where petabytes of data can be stored for a fraction of the cost while remaining accessible when needed by storage tiers with lower latency. Tape streams at a constant high throughput for contiguous data, avoiding the limiting factors associated with other storage options. When the price difference, security benefits, and environmental considerations are factored in, it’s easy to see why a growing number of businesses are making tape an integral part of their long-term data storage plans.
Securing training data with tape storage
The security benefits of tape cannot be overstated, especially where LLM training data is concerned. It may seem surprising that tape is playing such an important role in AI training, but it really shouldn’t be. The physical nature of tape means it offers a surefire way to enhance security, providing an offline copy of valuable data that attackers cannot access directly. This is critical, especially since the data sets being used to train LLMs likely include sensitive or proprietary information that might be of interest to cybercriminals. Attackers are constantly seeking to compromise cloud storage platforms to reach valuable data—but by safely partitioning that data on tape rather than in the cloud, organizations can keep their information secure while also ensuring it remains accessible for use in the future.
It’s important to note that data theft isn’t the only concern that can be alleviated using tape storage. Cybercriminals are finding new ways to manipulate or corrupt training data through data poisoning attacks, which seek to undermine the integrity of LLM training data and degrade the performance of AI models. By injecting false, misleading, or biased information into training datasets, attackers can significantly affect the accuracy of LLM-based solutions, and this can lead to a wide range of negative outcomes with differing degrees of severity. A poisoned data set might cause a chatbot to respond with slightly incorrect answers, but an affected LLM tool in the healthcare industry could have a serious negative impact on patient care. There are real cybersecurity risks here as well, as poisoned data sets can make data exfiltration easier and lead to costly breaches or stolen intellectual property.
Also worth noting is the fact that tape is helping organizations meet the increasingly strict regulatory and compliance guidelines surrounding data storage and AI. Tape provides a write-once, read-many (WORM) option that cannot be overwritten, providing an immutable storage option guaranteed to be tamper-proof for decades. As new rules and regulations emerge around how AI training data can be used, stored, and protected, the ability to leverage tape as a fully secure physical storage option ensure organizations can avoid running afoul of regulators while still ensuring ready access to their data.
A storage solution and a cybersecurity asset
Leveraging tape as a part of your data storage solution ensures that attackers do not have the opportunity to carry out data poisoning attackers or steal critical data. It ensures you can leverage significant volumes of data to train your LLM tools without facing the financial hardship associated with rising cloud storage prices, while simultaneously hardening your training data against cybersecurity threats ranging from simple data theft to advanced data poisoning attacks. As AI becomes increasingly integral to organizations across every industry, tape has emerged as both a valuable data storage solution and a critical cybersecurity asset.
