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Data resilience is an organization’s ability to ensure business continuity despite any unexpected disruption. It leverages an automated approach that standardizes data protection and provides centralized visibility and management across all workloads and locations. When data is resilient, it can’t be accessed or modified by unauthorized entities.
Data resiliency includes encrypting all backups – whether in transit or at rest – using military-grade (AES) encryption and supports the 3-2-1 backup rule. In a 3-2-1 approach, each backup has to have at least three versions. Two of the backups are stored in different types of media and at least one copy has to be air-gapped from the primary production environment.
The best data resilience platforms today are cloud-native and able to protect data assets no matter where they are geographically located. The benefits of data resilience in the cloud include:
- Standardized data protection across all workloads and environments.
- A shift-left approach to security across primary and backup environments.
- Accelerated recovery and restore times.
Techopedia Explains Data Resilience
Businesses have to be able to protect and manage data assets no matter where they are stored, and it’s important to protect backed up data from malicious activity, accidental deletion and damage by internal or external forces.
Data resilience software can respond to red flag alerts autonomously and in the event of data loss or corruption and can enable a business to get back online in a matter of minutes with minimal disruption.
The Four Principles of Data Resilience
While cloud adoption has created new opportunities for businesses, it has also revealed how difficult it can be to protect distributed data with legacy backup systems that were designed for a different era. To add to the problem, many information technology (IT) teams today are significantly understaffed, a situation that’s been aggravated by a global shortage in cybersecurity talent.
Maintaining data resilience in-house requires special skills, which is why so many enterprises are migrating to a no-maintenance, software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach that supports four important principles:
1. Composable infrastructure – allows an organization to scale compute, network and storage resources as needed. An infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) approach uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to continuously monitor data assets and proactively address problems in the data infrastructure. The cloud gives IT administrators and business owners easy access to the latest technology without requiring additional staff to manage it.
2. Global policies – allows an organization to follow best practices for data management in a holistic manner across all environments. When policies are global, it ensures that an organization’s data resilience standards are met across the entire environment, while requiring management of these policies in only one place.
3. Self-service with central oversight – allows an organization to delegate certain responsibilities for maintaining data resiliency to application and data owners, while still providing IT protection administrators with centralized control. The central oversight is necessary to ensure the organization and its data will always be protected.
4. Prescriptive analytics – data resilience platforms are able to analyze billions of data points and events across multiple environments in real time and deliver intelligent insights about how to optimize protection, reduce costs, and protect from ransomware. Prescriptive analytics can predict issues and provide recommendations on how to prevent failures before they even happen.
The Role of Object Storage in Data Resilience
When data is resilient, it cannot be modified by internal or external threats. Because cloud-based platforms use object storage, administrators can apply unique access policies at the object, bucket and user/group levels. While it’s possible to add or delete a storage object, it’s not possible to modify data once it’s stored in an object.
This is important because backup systems that use file system storage are vulnerable to a much wider variety of legacy and zero day exploits, including business email compromise (BEC) and ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) attacks.
