Top 10 Data Management Challenges: Availability & Security

Businesses across the globe are increasingly leaning on their data to power their everyday operations. This makes better data management a top directive for leading enterprises. In the first part of this three-part blog series, we look at three leading data management challenges: database performance, availability and security.

Data is king. In business, no truer words have been spoken, as the value of a company today can often be measured by the performance and usage of its data. As the number of devices, frequency of user interactions and volume of data stored increase and change rapidly, so too must the methods behind leveraging, securing, managing, extending and maintaining this data.

More Data, More Value—But Is It Available and Secure?

The current digital business landscape requires companies to be able to provide employees, partners and customers with secure access to critical enterprise systems and applications at anytime, anywhere. While responding to this need, data management challenges inevitably arise in terms of:

How can you keep up? In the first blog of this three-part series, we’ll help you break down and solve three of the top ten data management challenges that enterprises around the world face today: database performance, data availability and data protection.

1. Challenge: Optimal Database Performance at All Times 

Your OpenEdge database is an extremely dependable machine—customers and partners often tell us, “It just runs.” But like any machine, it needs to be checked from time to time to gauge its performance. Just like a car; if you drive it for years without performing routine maintenance, one fine day you may find yourself calling an Uber.

Databases often get overlooked—perhaps even more frequently than cars. Operating a business is time consuming and the “set it and forget it” mindset can easily seep into key aspects of your business, like database health. For that reason, it’s extremely important to conduct regular database checks to ensure optimal performance.

Solution: OpenEdge Services Database Healthcheck 

Progress Services Database Healthcheck is the right solution to keep your database running efficiently. The Database Healthcheck evaluates your KPIs to ensure high database performance and makes recommendations for maintenance as well as routine performance tuning. A comprehensive 16- to 24-hour consultation that provides best practices for maintenance and performance tuning recommendations is just one part of the overall database evaluation. Don’t let a neglected database cost you the edge you need to succeed. See OpenEdge Services Database Healthcheck for details.

2. Challenge: Always-On Performance for Unplanned Downtime

Running a business costs money. Running a business without access to your data costs a lot more. Erika Kalar writes in her 2017 article “How to Fight Outage Nightmares and Database Downtime,” “downtime losses average $100,000 per hour.” The numbers for some companies such as banks, stock exchanges and utilities have reached as high as millions of dollars per minute. How much data loss can your organization afford to withstand?

Solution: OpenEdge Replication 

The OpenEdge Replication solution provides enterprises with a three-pronged failover approach for ongoing maintenance and automatic transition in case of unplanned downtime. Data changes are automatically duplicated on the production database and moved to a set of mirrored databases at hot standby sites with complete transparency to the application.

OpenEdge Replication is a comprehensive recovery solution that provides peace of mind while enabling highly available OpenEdge applications. It can also be used in instances of planned downtime. See this webinar, Always On With OpenEdge, for details.

3. Challenge: Keeping Pace with Regulatory Issues, Protecting Data

You’ve heard it called “the new oil” but you know that your data is a goldmine. Whether you're talking about employee personnel files, customer transaction history, sales pipelines and trends, capital financial accounting, intellectual property inventory or any other type of data, it's key to your business’s success.

Over the last several years, several major corporations have failed to protect this precious commodity. Data breaches, either at the hands of hackers or employee negligence, are certainly costly. But the damage to an organization’s reputation and consumer confidence as a result of a breach is truly immeasurable.

Solution: OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

The OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption solution is built to solve your database security issues. OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption enables you to pinpoint the data you want to protect on disk, in backups or in binary dump files. Furthermore, TDE is one of the tools that can keep organizations compliant with various government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA and GDPR, the European Union Directive on Data Protection (EU-DPD). See OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for details.

Solution: OpenEdge Authentication Gateway

By partnering the OpenEdge Authentication Gateway solution with OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption, you can strengthen the security of your OpenEdge application. This formidable gatekeeper redirects initial access requests to confirm user legitimacy and scrutinizes each potential user to ensure appropriate access. See OpenEdge Authentication Gateway for details.

In the next part of this three-blog series, we’ll take a look at three more big data management challenges: accessing data from the cloud, synchronizing data from multiple sources while maintaining accuracy and accessing data without disrupting operations. In the meantime, feel free to check out our latest infographic, which also covers many of these data management challenges.

If you want to find out how these Progress solutions and services can help you tackle your data management challenges, speak to your Progress account manager today.

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