Many organizations send their tapes offsite to a tape vaulting service for data protection. Tape vaulting services will come to your company, pick up the tapes, and store them until you need them. They also often provide you with a workflow, audit trail and online tracking. But depending on how often you ship your tapes to a tape vaulting site, tape vaulting services can get expensive. In addition, it’s important to specify what your service-level agreement (SLA) requirements are, or you may not get your tapes back on time or when you need them.

In this podcast, David Chapa, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, discusses some best practices for tape vaulting. Find out the costs of tape vaulting services, how offsite tape storage costs are determined, how to negotiate your SLAs, and whether or not you should encrypt your tapes before you ship them offsite.