The Future of the Cloud Depends on Magnetic Tape

Every day, internet users create trillions of bytes of information, an inconceivable mass of ones and zeros, that are then stored in the cloud computing farms run by the world’s biggest companies. As data centers proliferate from the Midwest to the Arctic Circle, spare a thought for the cloud’s backup plan: untold hundreds of millions of magnetic tapes. “It’s part of what’s keeping the world running,” says Paul Luppino, director of technology services for data management at Iron Mountain Inc., which has stored more than 85 million inch-thick, four-and-a-half-inch square tapes across a worldwide network of roughly 210 warehouses and old mines. But these days, the tapes may pose their own problem for companies that require a steady supply.

Although the century-old technology has disappeared from most people’s daily view, magnetic tape lives on as the preferred medium for safely archiving critical cloud data in case, say, a software bug deletes thousands of Gmail messages, or a natural disaster wipes out some hard drives. The world’s electronic financial, health, and scientific records, collected on state-of-the-art cloud servers belonging to Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and others, are also typically recorded on tape around the same time they are created. Usually the companies keep one copy of each tape on-site, in a massive vault, and send a second copy to somebody like Iron Mountain. Unfortunately for the big tech companies, the number of tape manufacturers has shrunk over the past three years from six to just two—Sony Corp. and Fujifilm Holdings Corp.—and each seems to think that’s still one too many.