Data Loss and Corruption - the failure scenario not to overlook

Introduction

Data Corruption can lead to the permanent loss of data. Permanent data loss can mean failure to recover and therefore impacts business continuity, your firm’s reputation as well as the possibility of financial penalties.

It is therefore essential that you have a data loss prevention strategy in place to help mitigate against this key risk.

The first step in prevention is understanding. We must understand how data loss and corruption manifest, capturing all the key risk vectors, before putting in place any protections and measures.

What is Data Corruption?

Wikipedia defines Data Corruption as “errors in computer data that occur during writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing, which introduce unintended changes to the original data. “
In other words, data corruption is altered data content which makes data query returns behave in an unexpected way, relative to previously queried returns.

For example, if we store data in a table, we expect a query on that table to return the same data that was originally stored. If we receive different data or receive an error, or if the system crashes, then these are all potential signs of data corruption.

Common symptoms and causes of Data Corruption

Some common data corruption symptoms you may have will be familiar to all. For example:

• Systems may slow down or freeze randomly
• File names with jumbled up characters or changed file attributes
• Not being able to retrieve or open a file 
• Busy disk activity regardless of what may be going on with a given system

Some common causes of data corruption include:

• Physical issues with the disk’s platter
• Bad sectors, or overheating
• Power cuts or improper shutdowns
• Bad coding that prevents a program from saving correctly
• Issues elsewhere in the stack such as Operating System faults or sudden crashes
• Human errors such as overwriting, accidental modification or deletion 
• Malware or Ransomware attacks

Tips for avoiding data corruption and loss

There are many things that can be put in place to help you avoid data loss. Put in place some prevention and detection measures that target the common signs of data corruption such as using checksums and ensure you have a good backup strategy in place that is tested regularly according to your recovery process.

Data is still readable from the backup and if data corruption is detected early enough, you have the recovery option to restore from the last known good backup.

In tandem, you could use multiple backup options, local, off-site or to a cloud provider. You could also use RAID configurations to mitigate against some disc failure, but this should not replace a good backup strategy.

Then there are techniques such as data scrubbing or data cleansing, offering some detection capability with issue correction functionality via the use of redundant data/copies of the data.

Some protection from a cyber perspective would be to use an anti-virus software tool in tandem to restricting internal access to your most sensitive data.

And lastly, you could use tooling to monitor the health of your hard drives such as HDtune, HDDScan, Crystal Disk Info etc.

How FourthLine can help

FourthLine's technology risk and data resilience consultancy team can conduct a full review of your firm's current data and technology infrastructure and identify key risks and vulnerabilities to focus on. 

Enquire about our Technology and Data Risk consulting services here>