Data and Network Protection Requires Extreme High Availability—Cybersecurity Providers Should Take Note

As a data and network security provider, you’re promising your customers reliability and protection. But if you can’t guarantee database and application uptime, that promise means nothing. For businesses like yours, database downtime has the potential to be devastating to your revenue, reputation and market credibility.

How can your cybersecurity business defend itself against these major consequences? It starts with understanding one foundational truth: in the world of modern business and escalating threats, your database management system (DBMS) is the heart of your IT stack, and ensuring its resilience, reliability and protection must be top priority.

This is why Postgres has become the most loved, wanted and trusted database among innovative enterprises across industries. Its reputation for high availability, alongside its ability to guarantee data integrity, protect against breaches, mitigate human error and decrease risk of data loss has made it the go-to database for modern businesses—especially those for whom the stakes are as high as cybersecurity.

In this blog we’ll explore:

• The true power of extreme high availability;
• How EDB Postgres Distributed can turn high availability into extreme high availability;
• Why network and data security providers can’t afford to take high availability for granted.

Downtime leaves your guard down

Cybersecurity providers make an important promise of dependability and resiliency to their customers: “we’ll protect your data, so you don’t have to worry.” Unfortunately, if a provider’s database infrastructure isn’t highly available, then that promise amounts to very little.

As with the businesses whose data and applications they’ve promised to protect, a cybersecurity provider’s database is the backbone of their ability to function. All of their applications depend on that database being up and running without unnecessary downtime. Should the database crash or experience preventable outages, then all of the customer-facing solutions that depend on the database will go down, too.

Without a database like Postgres that can guarantee high availability, your solutions are vulnerable to unplanned outages, which will, in turn, damage your clients’ security. In these cases, you become the guard who falls asleep on the job, while robbers slip into the vault you were hired to watch over.

When your customers realize that your solutions took a snooze on the job, at the expense of their security, how do you think they’ll react? Probably not well.

In every industry, a lack of database high availability can result in a loss of revenue and customer trust. When it comes to cybersecurity, however, the repercussions could potentially be even greater, given the sensitivity of your work.

Alternatively, prioritizing high availability as a key feature of your database is the best way to prevent your organization from finding out how a client will react after a serious breach on your watch.

Achieving extreme high availability with EDB

As defined by EDB, extreme high availability provides organizations with up to five 9s of database availability, whether they’re on-premises, in the cloud or leveraging hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures. The promise of five nines means that their database will be functioning 99.999% of the time—nearly zero downtime. For payment processing providers, this means that your applications won’t see more than five and a half minutes of downtime in a year. On a daily basis, that amounts to just 864 milliseconds.

How does EDB accomplish this? With EDB Postgres Distributed—our extreme high availability solution—we address scheduled and unscheduled outages alike, strengthening Postgres’s reliability and disaster recovery capabilities. While this primarily allows EDB Postgres Distributed to eliminate nearly all unscheduled downtime, it also minimizes the downtime businesses often write off as unavoidable, such as during a Postgres database upgrade. 

Via multi-master replication and data distribution with advanced conflict management, data-loss protection and throughput up to 5X faster than Postgres native logical replication, EDB Postgres Distributed ensures that your database is functioning at peak performance, even during necessary maintenance. This extreme high availability is how we define an “Always On” database.

Always On, always vigilant

For network and data protection providers, EDB Postgres Distributed’s Always On guarantee means that your solutions won’t fail on your customers, ensuring that your market position isn’t damaged by loss of customer trust or the legal repercussions of improper data management. 

In fact, the challenges of businesses working with high volumes of data in highly pressurized situations that require true database agility were foundational considerations during the building of Postgres Distributed. Nothing is more important for a cybersecurity organization (or its customers) than the expectation of consistency and lightning-fast response time. EDB Postgres Distributed understands this, providing both your clients with the robust confidence that will let them sleep comfortably at night, and attribute that confidence back to your solutions.

You can only be reliable once you’re highly available

In a world where it seems like there’s a new type of cybersecurity threat to prepare for every day, businesses expect the highest level of performance from network and data security providers: consistent protection and rapid response time. In order to provide this, however, providers must have a database that ensures Always On functionality.

That’s why so many businesses like yours choose EDB Postgres Distributed: it combines the reliability of Postgres databases with extreme high availability, bolstered by a range of features that you can tailor to your organization’s specific needs. Additionally, EDB has bolstered this solution’s security capabilities via partners with industry leaders like Thales.

Show your customers that you’re committed to their business’ protection and success with EDB Postgres Distributed. You’re Always On, so they’re always secure.

Want to learn more about how to achieve extreme high availability for Postgres databases? Check out our eBook "EDB Postgres Distributed: The Next Generation of PostgreSQL High Availability!"