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THE CHALLENGE OF DEPLOYING SECURE AND HIGH AVAILABILITY IT SYSTEMS
Philip Merry , Software Engineer , SIOS Technology , on developing a comprehensive IT strategy that will provide both security and high availability .
You ’ ve undoubtedly taken the steps required to secure your organization ’ s businesscritical applications – hardened the firewalls , encrypted your databases , updated your anti-malware solutions and so on . hackers and intruders can undermine your efforts to ensure uninterrupted access to these applications in the event of an infrastructure failure .
A quick look under the HA hood
But if the underlying infrastructure supporting your business-critical applications fails , your business is going to be disrupted , with potentially serious ramifications .
Before we talk about how to overcome the challenges inherent in the interplay of your security and HA tools , let ’ s take a high-level view of how HA solutions work .
To enable continued access to your business-critical applications , you need to configure your underlying infrastructure for high availability ( HA ) – here meaning an infrastructure designed to ensure that your critical applications are accessible no less than 99.99 % of the time .
Typically , an HA solution brings together the infrastructure upon which your critical applications and databases run as well as an identical copy of that infrastructure that is standing by – preferably in a physically separate location – to take over in case something causes your primary infrastructure to become unavailable .
A key challenge , though , is that the very things you ’ ve done to secure your critical applications against
Data replication services in the HA solution work constantly to replicate data written to primary
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