Data Resiliency and Monitoring: Critical Components for Homeland Security By Nigel Stokes, CEO, DataMirror Corporate Responsibility In a recent poll of over 1,000 corporate security officers conducted by CSO Magazine, nearly half said they expect terrorists to launch a major strike against computer networks in the next 12 months. In order to ensure homeland security, corporations must do their part to protect systems and infrastructure against attacks. To date, most corporate security strategies have focused on deploying firewalls, anti-virus software and intrusion detection, as well as defining processes and procedures for secure login and password-protected access to corporate networks. But two critical areas of corporate security have been largely overlooked-data monitoring and data resiliency. Corporate data stored in relational databases is one of the most valuable assets an organization possesses. There is a clear need to keep detailed audit trails of corporate data that is maintained in electronic form, and to guarantee the continuous availability of critical data. There is also a need for government agencies, law enforcement and federal regulators to securely integrate, share and analyze information in a timely and efficient manner to ensure public safety. Data Resiliency In uncertain times, companies must resolve to implement contingency plans for high availability and disaster recovery. Companies of all sizes must rethink how they manage corporate data and address the challenge of making their systems more resilient and fault tolerant. Corporations and governments alike must focus on building resilient infrastructures that allow them to rebound quickly from any kind of system outage and protect their precious data assets. In many cases, tape backups do not provide sufficient levels of availability. Key homeland infrastructure including telecommunications, banking and finance, energy, transportation and health care may be at risk. Private and public organizations need to ask hard questions about how well-prepared they are in the event of downtime or disaster. Data resiliency solutions provide the ability to continuously mirror critical data and applications and automatically switch users from primary to recovery systems in the event of an outage. Resiliency software enables key systems to be thoroughly backed up and resilient 24/7. It also ensures that the systems that connect internal systems with business partners and suppliers remain continuously intact. The goal is to create a real-time zero latency enterprise that is virtually impervious to downtime. Data Monitoring The Internet and other electronic telecommunications networks are becoming a center for commercial transactions. Contracts, software, news articles, technical designs, land deeds, stocks, airline ticket confirmations and currency can be transferred across a telecommunications network without a single piece of paper ever changing hands. Such transactions require two critical elements that are often in conflict: auditability and privacy. As e-Business transactions occur, information is updated and deleted at the database level. Whenever a transaction item is updated or deleted, the information is typically overwritten to save storage space on the server. Typically, if an overwrite occurs, all known history of the transaction is lost. Data monitoring solutions solve this problem by creating and maintaining a history of transactional events in a secure audit trail with overwrite protection. The audit trail must contain a record of all data that was created, modified or deleted so that tampering can be quickly and easily detected, and the audit trail itself must be tamper-proof. Audit trails created by data monitoring software may be used to investigate crimes that occur on the Internet. Data monitoring enables organizations to maintain information which can be easily retrieved and reviewed by internal auditors, security staff, police investigators or federal regulators to ensure public safety. In the airline industry, for example, this may mean capturing comprehensive audit trails of electronic records such as flight school student records, flight logs and passenger manifests. Data monitoring solutions, combined with data resiliency solutions that protect corporate data and ensure its availability, provide two powerful tools that can be used to improve the security of corporate systems and combat the very real threat of cyber-terrorism. To learn more about DataMirror's data resiliency and monitoring solutions, download your complimentary LiveResiliency Solutions Kit or "ABCs of E-Records Management" White Paper, by visiting DataMirror's Resource Center at: www.datamirror.com/resourcecenter.