COVID-19 pandemic has its impact on all technological fields, and the number of cyberattacks has escalated during its course. An interesting statistic shows that there is about a 667% increase in Coronavirus-related attacks from March 2020. Not just the bigger corporates, but this threat runs down to the small and medium businesses too, and many of them have their databases attacked by ransomware. Here, an important point to note is that having an assumed breach is ideal in a variety of situations as you devise your security strategies. At the very first point when your enterprise data is stolen, you need to be ready to strike it out.
The most fundamental step in terms of ensuring database security is backing up your data. On top of this consideration, the key question of whether to back up your data may stand the test of time and security. In this case, there are many exceptions, too, rather than the norms followed to ensure that you do the data backup regularly, which is kept secure and always available.
Integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the data backups
Among the most important considerations for backup security, you have to give priority to business and your compliance goals with data. With the help of backups, as it is with the security administration measures, the key consideration is to strike a fine balance between integrity, confidentiality, and quick availability. The secondary considerations in terms of security include authentication, identification, authorization, and auditing, etc., all of which are essentials of access control management.
For instance, if you are considering the safety of PII or personally identifiable information at your backups, all the above aspects like availability, confidentiality, and integrity are equally important. You may consider the privacy breaches as attributed to the lack of any of these aspects.
Backing up without ClusterControl
The open-source databases tend to offer various tools which will help with the backups. You can use any of these tools based on your specific use cases and as per the database cluster you use. The major disadvantage of using such native backup tools is the maintenance cost. Specific tools like ClusterControl can offer many advantages over native tools.
It is important to have backups as the key aspect of your database operations. Any adverse incidents like ransomware, hardware failure, system crash, power failures, or human errors can have an adverse impact on your database, and tools like ClusterControl offers various possibilities in ensuring data security in such cases. It will allow you to manage the database backups better. With ClusterControl, you can have the features of various open-source backup tools wrapped into one, making it easier to plan and manage the backups for the open-source cluster of your choice. With ClusterControl, you can:
- Get an overview of all your data backups.
- Schedule or create a backup.
- Compress, encrypt, and archive the backups offsite.
- Custom-define all the retention policies.
- Receive the backup notifications from time to time
- Verify the backups at any point.
- Restore backups instantly.
You may take the assistance of expert providers like RemoteDBA.com for data backup and restoration support. Let us further explore the ClusterControl features in detail.
Overview of the backups
With this feature, you can quickly overview all the scheduled backups by accessing the ‘Backups’ tab. You can view the status of all the backups there, and you can also select the new options like, Create Backup, Scheduled Backups, Restore Backups. If you have to create or schedule a backup, just navigate the Backups > Create Backup > Schedule Backup to access the menu. ClusterControl will allow you to encrypt your database using the AES-256-CBC encryption algorithm, which is proven to be one of the strongest in encryption.
Apart from database encrypting, you can also do encryption of your backups. An important point to note here is that the encryption itself may not be enough to protect you from security breaches in case of ransomware attacks. An encrypted backup of data could re-encrypted by a ransomware attacker, which could further escalate into the breach if there are insufficient redundancies to ensure critical personal data in question is made available.
Define the retention policies
You can choose the option to custom set the retention period for your backups. The retention period set by default is 31 days, but you can readjust it as you wish. Similarly, you can also custom define the other retention policies from time to time.
Post-backup logs and instant notifications
Doing data backups is not a one-time activity. You need to keep a close track of all the statuses related to your ongoing backups. This needs to be followed as a means to verify that all your backups are up and running as scheduled. By using ClusterControl, you can have the job logs, with which you can keep track of all the statuses of your log activities. Further to checking the job logs, you can also set automated mail notifications, which will give updates on your backup statuses. In order to create this notification, you may go to the General Settings > Email Notification Settings > Backup.
Backup verification through restoration
Once the notifications are custom set, you can further verify the need for restoring the database backup based on the status notification. You can also verify it using the Restore and Verify option as a standalone process.
Similarly, ClusterControl comes with various choices of customizable options in terms of ensuring proper scheduling and execution of data backup with automation abilities. By learning all the features and functions of this tool, you will be able to automate the backup and alert process to stay ahead of the database backup and restoration process. This will also help you to effectively tackle the risks of a database failure, deletion, or ransomware attack.
Data backups are essential, and the corporates now give a big consideration to keeping the same. Proper planning must be done before starting any such backup schedules. As a part of data backup planning, you should also think of the type of your data and applications to impose any specific regulations, security compliance, and privacy needs.
