As companies grow and storage needs expand beyond a traditional, singular database setup, companies may find themselves needing a more elaborate database option. Distributed databases allow businesses to get all of the benefits of a database, with the capacity to store more data and make it accessible across the entire computer network. A distributed database is a database in which portions of the data are stored on multiple computers or servers within the network. As with any storage solution, there are both advantages and disadvantages to utilizing a distributed database.
Distributed databases do a wonderful job of providing internal data with organizational structure, increased shareability, improved availability, modular growth capacity, and improved processing speeds. However, no data storage solution is without its downfalls. In order to maximize the advantages of your organization’s distributed database and minimize faults, here are the vulnerabilities you should be aware of and how to strengthen your distributed database against them.
How your distributed database is vulnerable
Whether you presently utilize a distributed database, or you’re considering adopting one, these are the threats and vulnerabilities you need to watch for in order to keep your data safe, protected, and available when you need it.
Abuse of database privileges — The open, collaborative nature of distributed databases can enable unauthorized users to access data they shouldn’t. In order to prevent this, and ensure access is granted only to authorized users, you should define user access privileges among your users and manage access rights with query-level access controls.
Malware threats — To implement preventative measures against malicious activity within your database, you can start by making it more difficult for cybercriminals to capture user log-in credentials. One method is to configure your database to discriminate access against time of day and location data when a user requests access to detect unusual access activities. Attackers can also gain unrestricted access to your database via SQL injection. Managing query-level access controls can catch some of these attempts, but you’ll be able to pin-point malicious attacks more accurately if you combine this method with intrusion protection (to identify SQL injection strings) to send you real-time alerts to suspicious activity.
Physical vulnerabilities — Because the data within your distributed database is hosted on physical servers (aka physical storage units), it is vulnerable to the same threats any physical storage device faces: flood, fire, lightning, other physical damage, technical failure and more. If one or more of your servers is affected by any of these threats, your company could lose valuable data, along with downtime and profit losses in the aftermath. In order to prevent data and profit losses due to physical device damage or failure, it’s recommended that you backup your databases so that any lost data can be recovered and restored without hassle.
Data exposure — Sensitive data can be exposed when an unauthorized user gains access, unauthorized copies are made, or when a device containing the data is stolen. You can mitigate these risks by properly archiving data, encrypting your databases, and keeping a thorough inventory of the data held within your databases along with any devices containing copies of that data. By staying aware of where your sensitive data lives and making it unreadable to unauthorized users, you can help prevent its unintended dissemination. As you classify and take inventory of where your company’s sensitive data resides, pay close attention to whether data from multiple locations could be combined to reveal sensitive information.
Data synchronization — One of the biggest advantages of a distributed database is also one of its biggest weak spots. Distributed databases are often implemented to give users increased collaborative access to data across multiple database sites, while providing increased storage capacity. By implementing a distributed database solution, users can access and change data residing on any database via your computer network.
The main purpose of this function is to increase data access, availability and file sharing. Any permitted user can access the data they need at any time and any changes or deletions they make are then synchronized across the database so that multiple versions of documents and files are eliminated.
While this feature improves user performance and maximizes storage space, it’s also one of the biggest vulnerabilities of a distributed database system.
Because updates and deletions made by a user at one location are then automatically synchronized to data stored elsewhere, accidentally deleted files and irreversible file changes across your database are prevalent.
Similarly, this synchronization feature facilitates the spread of virus infected files from one user’s system to files across the database. With file synchronization in play, and no way to recover healthy, uninfected files, viruses can infiltrate your database and contribute to massive data loss, company-wide downtime, and profit losses.
In this way, one of the biggest advantages of your distributed database may also impinge data integrity control and security — leaving you with missing, deleted, or corrupted files that have been synchronized across your entire distributed database.
How to eliminate data sync and physical device vulnerabilities
With the proper planning, data protection and data recovery safeguards in place, you can strengthen the vulnerabilities within your distributed database in order to prevent data loss, company-wide downtime and profit losses connected to automatic data synchronization and physical device storage.
In order to maintain the benefits of your distributed database and eliminate these major vulnerabilities, your business should implement a reliable cloud backup solution that will allow you to:
- Backup data across unlimited databases (& proprietary databases)
- Automatically & continuously backup data so that every file and file change is accounted for
- Access and restore previous file versions so you can undo accidental changes & deletions
- Pre-emptively virtualize your servers to eliminate data-loss related downtime completely
- Restore data to the same device, or to a new one in the case of device damage or loss
These features will allow your business to rebound from data loss and data corruption due to viruses, floods, fires, human error, physical device damage, technical failure and more.
