Enterprise-level data security and recovery is a must-have for digital transformation success.
The scale of corporate digital transformation projects are becoming impressive. Such technologies as the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, Customer 360, Insurtec, not to mention the multicloud IT architectures, are already widely used in business. But they give rise to a critical question: can they be recovered with minimal data loss in case of an unforeseen failure?
Developing the strategy
When new digital transformation systems are created and tested, they are usually added to the existing data protection and disaster recovery infrastructure. Why create another one when your company already has already built ready-to-use security solutions a long time ago?
Yes, this is not always reasonable. However, disaster resilience remains one of the key requirements for the enterprise IT infrastructure, so the importance of proactive protection keeps growing, and it is better to elaborate the disaster recovery strategy in advance.
The enterprise disaster recovery should take into account the following parameters:
- Data source, owner, application, and origin;
- Long-term business and organizational requirements for disaster recovery, including recovery after failures due to the most common error—the human factor;
- Compliance with security requirements in the IT environment as a whole.
Choosing Provider
Companies that build data protection and recovery systems from scratch using open-source software exist, but they are very rare. The key to the modernization of your security systems is selecting the right cybersecurity solution provider. Special software systems can automatically manage data protection and recovery across applications, storage systems, and devices (including public and private clouds). Additional capabilities, such as data storage management, identification of non-protected files, and real-time monitoring of IS measures further increase the IT environment security, reliability, and efficiency. Combining applications with the state-of-the-art self-protecting storage systems can meet corporate IT performance requirements while providing near-instant recovery capabilities.
A general data protection and disaster recovery strategy involves many software and hardware components, and a portfolio of integrated solutions from a single vendor is often more convenient than a set of siloed systems that will require a lot of effort from IT administrators for integration and support.
There are also solutions that support applications on distributed architectures (Cassandra, HDFS, and MongoDB), which are popular in digital transformation projects.
Conclusions
In our opinion, it is crucial to start with developing the right protection and recovery strategy for digital transformation systems. As for NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB or distributed file systems such as HDFS, administrators usually believe that three copies are enough to give peace of mind even to a large enterprise. This disaster replication approach works fine unless one of the copies is corrupted and replicated three times.
What do you think? Have you ever experienced failures of advanced IT systems in production environments?
