By Rob Paller, Consultant
If you have attended a conference on data warehousing, business intelligence, data management, or data governance recently you ultimately have heard the saying, “Treat your data as a corporate asset”, countless times. Treating your data as a corporate asset means investing in data comparable to other corporate assets in terms of resources and technology. It also means that you understand the cost of poor quality, inaccurate, or missing data.
We have belabored the point that you should invest time and money into data integration technologies to assist you in mastering your master data elements. This is after you have invested the time, people and money to establish sound data governance policies. Nor does it discount the investment in the BI tools that can translate your data into information that can be used, understood and profitable.
What cannot be overstated is to the need to protect what is arguably your most important corporate asset from not only natural disasters and hardware failures but from both accidental deletion and intentional sabotage. At the end of 2008, JournalSpace, an online company in business since 2002, was forced offline permanently because their entire database was overwritten as the result of a malicious act. What made the situation fatal was their reliance on the hardware redundancy of RAID alone to protect their database. In other words, they did not archive their data.
Are you doing everything possible to cover your corporate asset? Here are several questions to help you determine your own disaster readiness:
- Are you logging all queries submitted to your databases and archiving these logs daily?
- Have you established a disaster recovery process for your database systems?
- Have you performed periodic disaster recovery drills to make sure you are able to bring the affected system(s) back online?
- Are your archives maintained in separate location from your database systems?
- When an employee with administrator privileges leaves the company do you not only remove their user accounts but change the admin passwords on the systems administered by the employee?
- Do you maintain an audit log of users with the ability to purge production data and failed logon attempts for these users or admin users?
- Do you maintain a separation of duties and/or environments for testing ETL processes?
Are you able to sleep well tonight knowing how well your asset is covered? If not, follow the seven steps above and you’ll rest easy.
Rob Paller is an expert at business analytics and database administration. Since joining Baseline, Rob has been responsible for developing a case analysis system to streamline the oversight of food assistance benefits, implementing a common citizen data model, and assisting in the rollout of a new public assistance data model integrating data from over 10 years of legacy with a new benefit eligibility determination system.
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