CIO OPINION
Unless your IT teams understand what your HA solution is doing and what your security systems are doing , one or the other is not going to work as effectively as you expect it to .
Philip Merry , Software Engineer ,
SIOS Technology
The challenge of deploying secure and high availability IT Systems
Philip Merry , Software Engineer , SIOS Technology , says it ’ s possible to ensure 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 .
But if the underlying infrastructure supporting your business critical applications fails , your business is going to be disrupted – with potentially serious ramifications .
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 . ensure uninterrupted access to these applications in the event of an infrastructure failure .
A quick look under the HA hood
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 .
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 hackers and intruders can undermine your efforts to
Data replication services in the HA solution work constantly to replicate data written to primary infrastructure storage to storage attached to the
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