Guarding the fort

By Mads Toubro, Vision Solutions

Financial services companies face particularly strong demands to protect the integrity and availability of their data and systems.

“Typically, more than 90 percent of downtime results from normal planned maintenance.”
-Mads Toubro

Clearly, losing all record of customers’ assets is not acceptable, but the need for data and system availability extends beyond good business practices.  The financial services industry is among the most heavily regulated of industries. Some of the regulations imposed upon firms in this sector require stringent protection of data and systems. The need is unequivocal, but how can financial institutions achieve the level of data and system protection required by customers, regulators and prudent business practices? To answer that question, one must understand the threats to data integrity and availability.

IT security threats

Today’s computers are very reliable, but hardware and software failures represent only a small fraction of the causes of data and system unavailability. Disasters rarely occur, but because of the enormous potential costs they impose, disasters must also be addressed in risk management plans. Human errors are more frequent occurrences, but they are still not the most common reason for data and system unavailability. Typically, more than 90 percent of downtime results from normal planned maintenance. At one time, “banking hours” allowed systems to be shut down during evenings, nights and weekends to perform maintenance, but global financial operations, online banking, and ATMs now require 24x7 system availability.
Traditionally, nightly tape backups were the primary form of data protection, but they are inadequate for financial institutions. The problems with tape are many. For one, restoring a data centre from tapes takes too long. Furthermore, because backup tapes are created only at night, data added or updated during the day is risk. Journaling can protect this data, but a disaster that destroys a production database will likely also destroy any local journals. This problem can be overcome if a remote journaling option is available, but this will not resolve the recovery time issue because, after a disaster, databases must first be recovered from tape before being brought up to date using the journal entries.

High availability solutions

To fully meet their data and system availability requirements, financial institutions require a high availability (HA) solution that replicates all data to a secondary system at a location far enough from the production server such that a disaster is unlikely to affect both systems. Then, users can be switched quickly to the backup system if a disaster occurs or maintenance must be performed on the primary system. HA alone is not sufficient. Often, only a portion of a firm’s data is destroyed or corrupted. For example, an operator might accidentally delete a critical file or a computer virus might delete or corrupt just a few records. This type of problem might not be noticed immediately and transactions may continue to be processed. If so, the organisation needs a way to recover only the specific data items or files to their state immediately before the problem occurred.

Traditional HA and disaster recovery technologies do not meet this need. Tape-based backups store data at night. Updates applied during the current day will not be stored on any tape. An HA solution doesn’t help in this case either because its replicator will immediately copy the deletion or unauthorised modification to the backup system. Fortunately, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) can solve this problem. CDP captures changes made to production databases and files and sends them to a secondary, disk-based data store. In most cases, CDP technologies can send the data to a remote location. Most CDP products provide graphical interfaces that automate the data recovery processes and make it easy to recover individual data items and files to a specific point in time.

Biography

Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, Mads Toubro is responsible for Vision Solution's business in the mature markets in Europe: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Benelux, Nordics, the UK and Ireland. Vision Solutions, Inc. is the world’s leading provider of high availability, disaster recovery and systems/data management solutions for IBM Power Systems.