Data Corruption Recovery and Data Security for Enterprise Applications

July 31, 2017

Topics: Cloud Volumes ONTAP Data Protection 5 minute read

Enterprise applications need to be able to adapt to circumstances that can threaten their data. What is your enterprise application’s capability to recover from data corruption?

Are you taking the proper steps to make sure that your data is correctly protected and safe from malware, ransomware, and other threats?

From tracking customer actions to serving crucial workflow pipelines, enterprise applications form the backbone of many company business models. They are vital, not just to IT but to the overall health of the business: if data corruption or a security breach threatens an enterprise application, the entire company will be at risk.

In the face of these considerable challenges, companies have turned to NetApp to nurture their enterprise applications’ transition to the cloud. NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP (formerly ONTAP Cloud) solution protects their data and facilitates effective recovery when something goes wrong—important requirements for optimized performance and management that companies demand.

The Nightmare of Corrupted Data

Imagine you’re in the kind of situation that no administrator wants to be in.

Your AWS control panel looks okay, but something is wrong. You can’t get the instance to operate correctly. Connections may not work. You have no access to a database that is critical for your enterprise application. In short, you’re in big trouble: your data is corrupted.

What kind of snapshots would you want to turn to in this situation?

Amazon S3 creates snapshots, but it’s a lengthy process that can wind up chewing into your budget. Also, snapshots in Amazon S3 aren’t especially consistent, which means that if you want to restore from one, you may not wind up with up-to-date information.

Your data corruption challenge has suddenly become a data loss problem.

More important than figuring out how the data was corrupted, it will be important to find a way to restore your system from an uncorrupted point in time.

For many enterprise applications, there is only a small window of time to resolve this problem: a period of time which should be as short as five minutes or less.

NetApp provides solutions that can get your system back in that time frame. NetApp Snapshot copies and FlexClone work together to allow you to quickly and efficiently restore from an uncorrupted state, and to bring your information back online. This recovery process is significantly faster than the lengthy process normally associated with bouncing back from a corrupted state.

Protecting Your Data from Corruption

You may be able to wake up from the corrupted data nightmare, but there is something else to keep you up at night: is your data secure?

In today’s troubled internet even the largest businesses are vulnerable to breaches that can publicly expose the data of millions of customers. Ransomware attackers can lock you out of your own data and not let you back in until you pay up.

Either situation can cause a significant amount of damage to a company’s reputation and its ability to create revenue.

The best antidote to those sleepless nights is encryption. In a nutshell, encryption makes your data safe from unauthorized access. Algorithms translate your data into unreadable text that can only be read again after it is decrypted—which can only happen with the use of the security key in your possession.

Encryption isn’t always just a careful security measure; in some cases it is the law. Some enterprise applications will have to secure data in order to comply with government regulations. HIPAA, for example, is a compliance law that requires the personal health information (PHI) to be kept secure and private—and this necessitates encryption.

Though AWS and Azure both offer services to keep your data safe—and there are, of course, open-source tools as well—you may find that they are not adequate for your enterprise application.

Key management, application performance, and integration with your cloud service provider are things to consider when it comes to data security, but you may not feel that it keeps you safe in the long run.

So, what can you do to achieve the level of data security that you need?

Achieving the Right Level of Data Security

Prevention is one part of the solution: NetApp FPolicy automatically monitors and detects anomalous behavior so you can stop attacks before they can harm your system.
You don’t have to give in to ransom demands just because your data is being held hostage. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a crucial part of the NetApp solution to overcome this challenge. By using NetApp’s SnapMirror technology, Cloud Volumes ONTAP lets you store encrypted data and sync it with on-premises data centers and in the cloud. Your Cloud Volumes ONTAP Snapshots can come to the rescue and get you back up and running before the ransomers even realize they have been outmaneuvered.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP Encryption keys are another asset in managing the security of your data. With data-at-rest encryption, Cloud Volumes ONTAP keeps data protected from unauthorized access. Encrypting and decrypting takes place through the use of encryption keys stored on key managers that are exclusively controlled by you.

Conclusion

There is a common theme to data corruption and data security that cannot be missed: you need to be able to bounce back when something impacts your ability to use your data.

Whether technical mishap or a malicious attack, the resources to get back online and in a healthy state have to be part of your enterprise application cloud deployment strategy.

With powerful encryption tools and the resources to restore your data if it is ever held for ransom, you can protect your enterprise application from harmful downtime. Partners such as AWS and Azure can help, but there are other solutions available that can offer more.

This post is just a preview of how NetApp solutions can help you overcome enterprise application data recovery and security challenges.

But dealing with corrupted data and securing your data is just one of the challenges for enterprise applications. High availability and continuous operation are also important to keep in mind, as well as finding ways to deal with how you can approach disaster recovery and keeping your costs under control.

Want to get started? Try out Cloud Volumes ONTAP today with a 30-day free trial.

Gali Kovacs