You rely on Oracle Fusion Applications to keep supply chains running, maintain customer relationships, and account for billions of dollars, yen, and euros flowing across global organizations. So reliability is crucial.

Fusion Apps run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and benefit from high availability and disaster recovery measures that some might call extreme. These include the ability to replicate databases to Oracle-operated, stand-by facilities in near real-time. Stand-by facilities are materially identical to their production counterparts and benefit from Oracle Data Guard, enabling high availability and data protection. In the event of a catastrophe, a robust recovery plan is ready to help bring Fusion Apps back online quickly.  

While you may not know it, you benefit from similarly well-developed plans for responding to cases of extreme data corruption. This post will help you understand what protections are in place and how you can access relevant documentation. 

Data corruption recovery basics

To help you meet risk-related responsibilities, Oracle publishes two types of documentation that explain Fusion Apps’ disaster recovery and business continuity measures—and their effectiveness. First, “practices” documents show how we approach disaster recovery. Second, “evidence” reports demonstrate that our practices work. Example documents available on My Oracle Support include:

Practices:

Evidence:

  • The annual “Disaster recovery evidence document” (My Oracle Support login required), which shows our ability to recover from a data center failure
  • The annual “Full environment rebuild and Fusion Cloud Service restore from backups” (FERFCSRFB) report, which showcases our ability to recover from data corruption events

The FERFCSRFB is new and reflects an improved Fusion Apps recoverability posture. It’s designed to be updated annually and made available to you via your Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications cloud portal (your centralized access point for managing instances). 

Digging into the new functionality and report

Usually, disaster recovery based on standard data replication procedures is sufficient to restore a Fusion Apps pod when something goes wrong. But when data corruption is involved (e.g., following an attack by malware or a bad actor), a full environment rebuild and restoration from backup may be required. To address this need, we developed the ability to restore a Fusion Apps environment to a point-in-time that precedes the corruption. We tested it, too, and the results are captured in the FERFCSRFB evidence report.

How does it work?

The new FERFCSRFB report details our ability to:

  • Restore the data
    • Identify a backup point preceding the data corruption
    • Populate a new Fusion Apps pod with data recovered from the backup
  • Reset the mid-tier stack to avoid re-introduction of malicious code
    • Deploy a brand-new mid-tier stack (i.e., virtual machines, web servers, etc.)
    • Configure the recovered database to use the new mid-tier stack
    • Restore configurations and verify
      • Recover Fusion Apps pod metadata, restoring configurations and settings to the original production state
      • Complete Fusion Apps pod validation testing to verify recovery

        • Summing up

        Demonstrating our ability to recover from disasters or severe data corruption is an essential element of your Fusion Apps services. We document our practices and evidence of their efficacy to help give you a detailed understanding of our recoverability posture—and so IT, information security, and risk stakeholders can verify that Fusion Apps are available when you need them most. 

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