How Advanced Data Lineage Can Minimize Risk as Part of Operational Resilience

The risk from cyber-attacks and system failure for large organizations is immense and grows each day. Businesses need to be continually assessing their risk and planning to minimize the impact of any form of system failure. This is even more so in heavily-regulated industries, such as finance and healthcare – where the impact is even greater on people and the wider economy. But have you ever considered how other organizations use advanced data lineage to minimize business risk as part of operational resilience?

In this blog, we’ll give a couple of examples to help you see how you might use data lineage for another purpose beyond your current or anticipated use.

For those less familiar with data lineage, a quick introduction. Advanced data lineage is the most sophisticated form. It enables you to build a map view across your entire organization of where your data comes from, through which systems it flows, how it transforms – and what this means from a business perspective for you. You can also use it to see future, what-if scenarios of how this map could look in different circumstances – such as when new systems are put in or if certain systems were shut down.

Reduce Recovery Time from a Cyber-Attack or System Failure

Reducing your recovery time from an attack or failure is critical to minimize the financial, contractual, and reputational impact it might have. Solidatus advanced data lineage is used by customers to build a map view of all data and how it flows through the organization. As regards operational resilience, it is used to map the relationship between different systems and applications—and understand their dependencies on one another.

Once this has been done, you know the best and quickest recovery sequence after an attack. You can’t recover all systems at once, so understanding the dependencies and priorities helps identify which to bring back first, as they have more systems dependent on them. As it’s a live, interactive map view and covers all systems—not just a subset as some more basic forms of lineage do—you can be accurate and trust your understanding of all of this information exactly when you need to.

As Solidatus shows business information, such as names of system owners, you can quickly contact the right people at the right time as needed, and communicate with the relevant staff, customers, and partners accordingly.

Understand the Time Needed for Systems to be Back up

Our customers not only want to know the priorities and order to bring systems back—but also how much time is needed to do so. This helps with planning, as well as in real time when an event happens, in order to set expectations and support communications. Customer-facing teams might not be able to take payments, for example, so business is paused for a while—and departments need to understand and set expectations with customers.

With Solidatus advanced data lineage, you can add business information as tags so that you can see them in your map view. You can include a wide range of information from service agreements, such as their agreed time to recovery. Solidatus will calculate the time needed to get all impacted systems back up and running.

All of this helps provide an ordered, planned, and proactive approach which is fundamental in minimizing impact. It also demonstrates to regulators—under legislations such as DORA—that you have strong foundations in place and have taken every step to prepare and minimize risk.