The Challenges at Play for Government Data

This blog post is an excerpt from the recent GovLoop and Oracle industry perspective, Mitigating the Impact of Data Loss & Outages in Government. Download the full report here.

Agencies across government and the nation’s critical departments — including transportation, energy, emergency services and financial services — rely on electronic data and the related computer systems to share, process, manage and store that information. The protection of these is critically important to our nation’s future.

While getting backup and recovery right is important for any organization, it is particularly difficult to achieve in government due to three serious challenges: transactional services, regulations, and evolving cyberattacks. Let’s examine each in detail:

TRANSACTIONAL SERVICES:

Government data is highly transactional; information and data is constantly flowing back and forth between citizens and the agencies that serve them. Backups that occur daily, or even hourly, guarantee data loss exposure and do not provide appropriate protection for transactional environments that change constantly.

REGULATIONS:

Due to regulatory compliance statutes that are unique to government, and requirements about backup and recovery set by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), agencies must be more certain than ever they can recover data confidently, in minimal time and can easily prove it. Slow or uncertain recovery without any visibility or reporting capabilities will severely limit public sector compliance efforts.

EVOLVING CYBERATTACKS:

Agencies need an agile recovery solution to be able to rapidly restore to a point in time prior to a cyberattack in order to minimize any detrimental impact to agency-held data.

“For the public sector, the stakes are incredibly high,” said Woods. “The data we’re talking about is not just important for public confidence; it’s crucial to our nation’s operations, economy and security. So, safeguarding these computer systems and vital data isn’t just important – it’s essential.”