The Oracle Backup & Recovery product team is excited to announce the Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service. This new fully managed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service is based on the on-premises Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance technology and delivers industry-unique protection capabilities for Oracle Database services running on OCI. The Recovery Service helps organizations recover business-critical data from ransomware attacks with zero data loss, comply with financial requirements by improving operational efficiency, and meet user expectations for cloud service simplicity.

Reduce ransomware risk

Organizations are focused on the critical goal of reducing business risk due to ransomware activities, which includes data deletion, alteration, or theft. In the case of malicious data deletion or data alteration activities, knowing you have a validated backup ready for recovery that captures the current state of the production database – this provides zero data loss recovery (Figure 1), which is key to mitigating operational and financial risks. The Recovery Service protects database transactions in real-time and enforces a minimum 14-day backup retention window, which means your database can be recovered with zero data loss up to the last sub-second of transactions, without the possibility of deletion or alteration of the latest backups. Finally, there is the risk of data theft, and the Recovery Service reduces the impact of this risk by mandating that all backup data remain encrypted through its entire lifecycle with encryption keys stored externally to the service. Without access to the encryption keys, stolen backups are rendered useless, helping prevent backups from being used as a vehicle for malicious data theft.

Image showing the protection details for a database
Figure 1: Sample Database protection screen, which shows the “FINANCE” database is protected with real-time data protection, and there are Zero seconds of data loss exposure.

 

Fast, predictable recovery

Time is a critical factor during database recovery operations, and the Recovery Service has the unique ability to offload the immediate, on-demand creation of a full backup. Now your latest backup is always represented as a full backup which eliminates the unpredictable, time-consuming task of having the production database service first restore a weekly full backup and then restore and apply multiple daily incremental backups. To help reduce the stress of traditional database recovery methods, there is an easy-to-understand workflow (Figure 2) that is completed with just a few mouse clicks.

Database Restore dialog showing restore to latest, restore to timestamp and restore to SCN.
Figure 2: Restore Database dialog which allows the user to select the options that will be used by the automation to recover the database.

 

Improved operational efficiency

Operational activities and processes used to protect Oracle databases can be resource intensive. Weekly full backups of production Oracle databases will consume valuable CPU, memory, and I/O resources on the OCI database service which could be better utilized for day-to-day business workloads. Validating backup restoration takes even more resources away from the production database, which can decrease database performance or increase the cost of maintaining performance at a consistent level. The Recovery Service eliminates the time and resource overhead required to take a weekly full backup, switches database protection to an incremental forever paradigm, and offloads all backup validation processes to the Recovery Service. As a result, your operational efficiency is increased because the impact from backup and validation on production database resources has been minimized or eliminated, which can help lower your overall cloud costs.

Cloud automation and simplicity

Managing the operations and activities associated with a mission-critical datacenter can be an overwhelming task. OCI has simplified that management paradigm for the Oracle Database by providing database lifecycle automation, and this cloud simplicity continues with the Recovery Service. With just a few clicks (Figure 3), the Recovery Service starts protecting your database and all the operational information, such as backup health and space consumption, is displayed for all protected databases on an easy-to-read dashboard (Figure 4).

Shows the configuration screen for backups
Figure 3: Shows the simple interface used to configure automatic backups for the database.

 

Table that shows the protected database details for all databases in a compartment
Figure 4: Shows the protection dashboard for all databases in the OCI Compartment.

 

The Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service (Figure 5) delivers unique Oracle Database protection capabilities on OCI and is not available with any other cloud service providers (Figure 6). Customers who leverage Exadata Database Service, Enterprise Database Service, or Standard Database Service can configure their automatic backups to use the Recovery Service with real-time protection enabled which provides zero data loss protection. These database services will start getting the benefits of reducing ransomware risk and increasing operational efficiency with cloud management simplicity.

Images shows a high-level overview of Recovery Service
Figure 5: High-level overview for functionality provided by the Recovery Service.

 

Table of features comparing functionality with other cloud backup solutions
Figure 6: Recovery Service comparison to other cloud backup solutions.

 

Join us at Oracle CloudWorld to learn more about this exciting new service in OCI. There will be two informative sessions and staff available for questions at the Demo Grounds.

Oracle CloudWorld Learning Session: 
Zero Data Loss Protection of Oracle Database in OCI [LRN3475]

Oracle CloudWorld Lightning Session: 
New Zero Data Loss Protection Capabilities for Oracle Database in OCI [LIT4249]

CloudWorld Hub at The Venetian: 
Oracle Data Protection for On-Premises, Hybrid, & Cloud Strategies [DB-04]

You can also visit the product web site at www.oracle.com/database/zero-data-loss-autonomous-recovery-service/.