Augment Okta’s EDR with Acsense’s Tenant-Level Disaster Recovery
In today’s interconnected world, where digital infrastructures form the backbone of numerous businesses, ensuring the robustness of these systems against unforeseen disruptions is paramount.
Okta’s Enhanced Disaster Recovery (EDR) has provided organizations with substantial resilience capabilities, ensuring higher service uptime and availability. However, at Acsense, we understand that disaster recovery (DR) needs to be both comprehensive and granular, especially when it comes to safeguarding identity access management (IAM) systems.
This blog introduces our innovative product designed to augment the existing Okta EDR, focusing on the data-layer of disaster recovery.
Introduction to Disaster Recovery
- Defining Disaster Recovery (DR): Disaster Recovery refers to the strategic plan and processes put in place to quickly resume business functions following a disruptive event. This includes a combination of policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems.
- The Imperative of DR for Business Continuity: DR is integral to the business continuity plan, safeguarding an organization from data loss and system unavailability that could cause significant business disruptions or financial loss.
- The Human Element in Disaster Recovery: Integrating the human factor into your disaster recovery (DR) plan is critical. This involves ensuring that all personnel involved are well-trained and prepared to act under stress and uncertainty. To foster this, continuous training and simulations should be conducted to enhance decision-making capabilities and operational readiness during an actual disaster.
- Challenges and Strategies in DR: Common DR strategies must navigate the complexities of modern IT environments that include cloud services, remote servers, and a myriad of data compliance requirements. The challenges lie in balancing cost against the need for rapid recovery and the increasing sophistication of cyber threats.
Shared Responsibility in Cloud Environments
- Exploring the Shared Responsibility Model: In cloud computing, security and compliance are shared responsibilities between the cloud service provider and the customer. The provider typically is responsible for the security “of” the cloud (e.g. Platform) while the customer is responsible for security “in” the cloud (e.g., data and configurations).
- Vendor vs. Customer Responsibilities: It’s essential to clearly delineate which aspects of DR are handled by the vendor and which fall under the customer’s purview. This could include who manages backups, incident response, and data encryption.
- Visualizing the Responsibility Division: A visual diagram or chart is effective in showcasing the distinct areas of responsibility, providing customers with a clear understanding of their obligations in maintaining robust DR practices.
Okta’s Enhanced Disaster Recovery (EDR) Features
- Overview of Okta’s DR Capabilities: Okta offers built-in DR capabilities that ensure its services remain operational and accessible during various disruptive events. This might include measures to counteract AWS infrastructure failure or power outages in a specific region.
- Strengths and Limitations: While Okta’s DR features provide a solid foundation, they do not cover every DR scenario, particularly those that are specific to customer data and customized configurations.
- Typical DR Scenarios: It’s important to discuss which scenarios Okta’s DR addresses, such as site outages and regional disruptions, and where additional customer-initiated DR measures are required.
Acsense’s Data-Layer Disaster Recovery (DR) Solution
- Addressing the Gaps in Okta EDR: While Okta EDR focuses on extremely high service availability, it does not address potential data modifications by bad actors or internal configuration errors. Acsense’s DR solution fills these critical gaps.
- The Comprehensive DR Solution: Acsense’s DR feature set includes tenant-level recovery, reversion capabilities, tenant role back for tenant changes, and recovery of deleted data, providing a thorough DR solution.
The Importance of Data-Layer Disaster Recovery
Adding DR at the data layer is crucial for comprehensive protection.
Reliance solely on platform-level DR can leave gaps in security, particularly against threats like bad actors who might alter or delete data, or unintended configuration errors by internal staff. Acsense addresses these vulnerabilities by offering tenant-level recovery options, ensuring that every aspect of the IAM framework is robust against disruptions.
Comprehensive Disaster Recovery with Acsense
- Stand-By Synched Tenant: Acsense provides a stand-by synchronized tenant feature, ensuring rapid and smooth recovery with minimal downtime (low RTO and RPO).
- Automated DR Testing: Through regular automated DR testing and a Recoverability Report, Acsense ensures that the DR plan is always ready to be enacted at a moment’s notice.
- Last-Mile Integration: Acsense’s Last-Mile integration with customer vaults ensures data is secure and recoverable even in the final stages of the DR process.
- Failover Process Management: During an actual failover, Acsense manages the transition process, maintaining operational integrity and minimizing impact on end-users.
Augment Okta’s EDR with Acsense’s Advanced DR
By enhancing Okta EDR with Acsense’s tenant-level disaster recovery, organizations can achieve a more resilient, comprehensive, and strategically sound disaster recovery posture. This approach not only safeguards critical business operations but also significantly reduces financial and operational recovery costs.
Ready to Elevate Your Disaster Recovery Strategy?
Act now to ensure that your identity access management systems are fully protected against any disruption.
