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Network and storage outages not just cause inconvenience to organizations but also impact business bottom line. As per the most recent outage analysis report more than 60% failures result in annual loss of $100,000. There is no guarantee that any system can be 100% resilient to all disasters and threats but robust policies and procedures ensure that business resilience can be achieved by active protection of mission critical systems and data from disruptions and outages.
In today’s topic we will learn about data resiliency, why it is important, core principles of data resiliency.
Data Resiliency
Data resiliency is the ability of an organization to ensure protection, recovery and maintenance of its data in the event of disruptions and unexpected events. These events could be related to failures of hardware, software, software glitches, cyber-attacks, natural disasters, human errors or insider threats. A resilient data infrastructure is designed in a manner that it prevents data loss, minimizes downtime, and enables quicker recovery from any adverse events.
Challenges of Data Resiliency
- It is tough nut to crack when it comes to distributed architectures as obtaining resiliency across different systems, databases and applications could be challenging.
- The volume and speed of data generation overwhelm traditional data management systems and building a resilient system to handle that kind of data load could be a daunting task.
- Integration of legacy systems in resilient architecture or framework is difficult as older systems were not designed keeping resiliency in mind.
- Adherence to regulatory requirements related to data residency , data sovereignty and privacy adds additional complexity layer while designing resiliency.
Importance of Data Resiliency
Data is the lifeline for any businesses without which business will come to a standstill. The loss or unavailability of data would have severe consequences which will entail financial losses, reputation or brand damage, and legal liabilities, fines or penalties linked with availability SLAs committed to their clients.
Data resiliency ensures businesses run without disruptions, enable recovery within acceptable timeframe and continue crucial services in the event of complete disaster also.
Principles of Data Resiliency
While drafting data resiliency strategy it is crucial to consider the business continuity plan holistically. Mission critical data or assets are based on business needs and overall usage of data. The four must haves are required to achieve complete data resiliency.
- Secure data backups – Secure, regular and successful backup of each data set is important. You can use solutions like backup as a service (BaaS) to automate backup and recovery. These solutions are mostly used by organizations hosting their IT infrastructure over cloud and prefer to rely on the backup and recovery services from their cloud providers. The cloud provider backup and recovery solutions are full proof and provide additional benefits such as multi-region redundancy etc for your data backups with full disk encryption and access control mechanism in place to ensure security of backups.
- Backup storage in multiple locations – Data redundancy is achieved by storing backup media offsite in older days in firesafe cabinets etc. with cloud hosted environments this data redundancy is achieved by storing data at multiple locations spread geographically. Major cloud providers provide 3 geo redundancy , multiple availability zones kind of arrangement with 99.99% SLA commitment on their backup and recovery services.
- Ease and quick data recovery – Any data resiliency strategy is incomplete if data recovery in an easier and quick manner is not thought through. It is essential to establish recovery time and recovery point objectives.
- Data organization into appropriate buckets – Data segmentation is a key aspect of data resiliency planning. You need to identify and prioritize data sets which you need to recover first after a disaster strikes such as servers handling payments or payroll services are more crucial in the recovery queue then a server which provides chat services.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am here to share my knowledge and experience in the field of networking with the goal being – “The more you share, the more you learn.”
I am a biotechnologist by qualification and a Network Enthusiast by interest. I developed interest in networking being in the company of a passionate Network Professional, my husband.
I am a strong believer of the fact that “learning is a constant process of discovering yourself.”
– Rashmi Bhardwaj (Author/Editor)
