With that in mind, I have a question for everyone in corporate America: Why is it that in your organization, the only individuals who can locate data from a specific backup that resides on a specific tape are the backup administrators?

You would think that if one can go out to google.com, search for some interesting but largely unneeded factoid such as "number of Google page hits" and find that discussed on the "support.proboards.com" Web site, surely someone or something other than the backup guys would be able to tell you what data is on a specific tape and where that tape is located.

Yet for most organizations, that is not the case. Rather, this basic and critical corporate information is still only accessible and retrievable by just a few people.

Granted, there are some good reasons all data is not viewable by everyone. For one, I am grateful that not everyone can just jump onto google.com, type in my name and retrieve my driving or medical history. (By the way, I checked, and you cannot.) Truly there are some records that should remain inaccessible to the general public.

With all of the technical innovation that has occurred in the past 10 years, why can't organizations google for the information they need to run their business? Well they can, and I'll discuss how they can do that next week.