Case Study: Seminole Hard Rock Casino - PCI Compliance for 5 years of data backup on tape
Jeff Odenheimer Sr. Network Administrator at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
"We had a complicated compliance issue at Hard Rock. Data-Tech's engineers came up with a unique solution and helped us achieve PCI Compliance for our Data."
Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino had a unique challenge. They had 5 years of LTO tape backups that needed to be encrypted. Jeff Odenheimer received our name from a shared vendor for long term file storage. We had been doing business with this vendor and their clients for several years.
Jeff gave us call because he was told we focus on IT Solutions not just IT Products. Jeff said we were described as a company that likes challenges and creating unique cost effective solutions.
Hard Rock had the need to encrypt 5 years of LTO Tape Backups for PCI compliance but also had a small budget in which the project needed to be completed. Data-Tech's CEO and R&D Engineer Chris Lietz took the challenge to the senior engineering team at Data-Tech. Within a day the team came up with an elegant solution that would fit the Hard Rock project budget.
The team realized the challenge was to encrypt the tapes and keep the data structure of the tapes intact. This was the only way to ensure if Hard Rock needed to retrieve any data it would be where it was originally stored. The other solutions Hard Rock had received did not take this into account and Hard Rock was relieved and impressed that our engineering team was able to realize this.
So the challenge wasn't really the encryption, it was preserving the original data structure after encryption. Our solution was simple. Analyze the tape structure for Server and Resource names, Create a Virtual Environment to replicate the original servers, restore the data to its original locations, then backup the data again this time using Encryption.
Because the backups were up to 5 years old, many of the servers and data locations were gone or changed on the Hard Rock network. So this was the only way to preserve the data structure and integrity.
Data-Tech created a special Virtual Server Farm and was able to recreate the server structure for each data backup. Hard Rock had 5 locations with data and PCI compliance needed to be achieved in only a few months. Within the Virtual Server Farm Data-Tech was able to have several Data Restore and Backup jobs running simultaneously.
Though the project took a little longer than estimated due to LTO Tape Speed limitations, the project was completed and the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino passed the PCI compliance Audit.
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