Is Database Vulnerability your Dirty Little Secret?
I tell anyone who will listen how databases are the often-overlooked weak spot in app and website availability. I’ve talked to a dozen e-Commerce execs who start our conversations with “We don’t have a downtime issue.” A few minutes in, you end up hearing, “Well, they don’t happen often. Every now and then.”
I can understand the defensiveness. Of course they’ve designed for uptime. The problem isn’t that the IT staff designed things poorly – instead, databases themselves have not kept pace with other IT technologies in readily enabling HA. So of course when news hits of an outage where the database is to blame, we’re never surprised. It happened again this week. Airline fliers faced delays from a 90-minute outage at major U.S. airports. The culprit? According to FoxNews, a “disruption in the chain” of databases serving the Federal Secure Watch List.
To avoid having your brand suffer the same social ire that airports and airlines received this week, take a second and third look at your database infrastructure. Think about the level of continuous availability customers demand today. You’ll never fully avoid database downtime, but have you architected in technologies that shield your customers from those outages? This eCommerce company has, and it saved them a lot of pain recently.
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