“Cold” is now “Hot” -the Age of HDD Storage & PCI Compliance
Renova’s PCI Compliant solutions have been on the rise- especially for security integrators, finance and enterprise customers. It’s no surprise to see newer articles on the rapid growth of the industry. For
example, a recent Western Digital article by Annie Herreria, “Why Cold Storage Is So Hot
Right Now” defines hard drive (HDD) “cold storage”, the increasing growing need for it, and how it differentiates from “hot storage.”
To give you a better understanding, we wanted to examine the definition of the practice, the basic principles, and tackle a few industry terms. So, what are Renova’s PCI Compliant Programs and HDD Cold Storage?
The term “Cold Storage” conjures the image of hard drives in a freezer, or a truck delivering frozen goods. But that it not it. “Cold storage” retains any data that is not actively in use. The Western Digital article mentioned above examines the difference between “hot” and “cold” state. For example, data that is stored in archives is defined as cold storage for infrequent access, whereas “hot” storage is production data, such as financial transactions that need to be accessed immediately.
HDD Cold Storage is growing. An interesting study, “Preparing For Infinite Data Retention” by Horison Information Strategies states “60% of all digital data can be classified as archival, and it could reach 80% or more by 2025, making it by far the largest and fastest growing storage class while presenting the next great storage challenge”.
"Cold is Hot" highlights the rising demand to retain data for future access.
At Renova, we agree this statement holds true and we are poised to tackle this fast-growing storage challenge. Furthermore, the statement above is especially true with financial institutions, which must retain (literally) libraries of hard drives from ATMs.
For example, we all know hard drives house millions of hours of video history and Renova’s experience is that this video history can be of utmost importance to the Bank, local law enforcement, and even the FBI.
A Protected Program & PCI Compliant
Renova Technology provides Hard Drive Cold storage services for national security integrators and enterprise end-users. While there are certainly other providers of this service, there are few or far between that provide full cycle programs from the refresh of equipment, maintaining inactive data media (hard drives), and data destruction. This is performed in complete PCI compliance (Payment Card Data Services).
