Growing Interest in Business Continuity in the New Fiscal Year: What is Cloudera's Proposed "Data Resilience Design"?

Cloudera K.K. (Location: Chuo-ku, Tokyo; President and Executive Officer: Yuji Yamaga), the only company providing AI for data everywhere, has announced a proposal on the importance of "data resilience design" to ensure business continuity even in the event of failures. This comes at a time when Japanese companies are entering a new fiscal year and reviewing their IT strategies and business continuity plans.

Many Japanese companies formulate and update their medium-term management plans and investment policies starting in April, and in recent years, with the expansion of IT investment, the "quality" of these investments is being questioned. Beyond mere digitalization and cloud migration, there is growing interest in redesigning IT infrastructure based on business interruption risks and flexible data utilization across multiple environments. IT is shifting from being a cost to a management foundation. In this context, companies are required to adopt a design philosophy that allows business to continue even when failures occur, rather than solely relying on "not stopping the system."

Eishin Yoshida, Solutions Engineering Manager at Cloudera, states: "Failures in cloud services and core systems are no longer exceptional events. In fact, in recent years, large-scale cloud infrastructure outages and SaaS failures have affected many corporate activities. Such failures highlight a reality in IT utilization: the fact that even highly sophisticated systems cannot completely avoid downtime or service interruptions.

The uncertainties surrounding IT systems are increasing year by year, including hardware failures, software defects, human error, natural disasters, and even geopolitical risks. Indeed, according to Microsoft's "Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025," Japan ranks 7th globally and highest in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of exposure to cyber threats. Furthermore, according to PwC Japan's 2025 Cyber IQ Survey, 40% of management recognizes cyberattacks and cyberterrorism by Russia, China, North Korea, etc., as the most important risk, a trend that has continued for three consecutive years."

In this situation, companies are required not only to "prevent failures" but also to consider "how to keep operations running assuming failures will occur." The key to this is architectural design based on data resilience.

What is Data Resilience?

Data resilience refers to an organization's ability to minimize the impact of data-related failures or malfunctions, recover quickly, and continue business operations. It does not simply mean backup or disaster recovery mechanisms.

Specifically, the following three perspectives are important:

• Availability: Maintaining the state where users and applications can access data when needed. The challenge is how to shorten the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

• Integrity: Maintaining data in an uncorrupted and unaltered state. Design is required to minimize the Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

• Security: Controls and governance to protect data from unauthorized access, loss, or theft.

To continuously meet these, the data infrastructure itself must be designed with the premise of "never stopping."

The Core of Design is to "Avoid Single Points of Failure"

Some corporate systems adopt configurations that depend on a specific cloud, a specific region, or a single data center. In such configurations, if a failure affecting the infrastructure itself occurs, the options for switching are limited, which can become a single point of failure and consequently impact business continuity. Failures can occur due to various factors such as hardware malfunctions, software defects, human error, natural disasters, and cyberattacks, and their location and cause cannot be fully predicted.

The purpose of resilience design is to create a state where operations can continue in another environment even if one environment becomes unavailable. It is important to design with the premise of "switchable anywhere," considering switching between cloud regions, between cloud providers, and even to on-premise environments.

The location and cause of failures cannot be fully predicted. That is why having data and systems that do not depend on a specific location or infrastructure greatly influences business continuity.

Technology Alone is Insufficient; "Process" Holds the Key

Another often overlooked aspect when discussing resilience is the importance of processes. No matter how advanced the technology introduced, disaster recovery and failover plans are meaningless if they are merely nominal.

There are cases where disaster recovery plans, once created, are not updated in response to changes in organizational structure or system configuration. A truly functional plan is not only documented but also regularly verified, and its feasibility confirmed through training and exercises.

In practice, the following perspectives are important:

• Prioritization of Workloads: Clearly define systems where business interruption is unacceptable, such as transaction processing and medical data monitoring, and define RTO and RPO.

• Ensuring Redundancy and High Availability: Establish configurations that allow switching between environments to ensure business continuity even in the event of a failure.

• Backup and Governance: It is important to protect not only data but also metadata, access controls, and policies.

"All-Directional" Preparedness Required by Japan's Unique Environment

When considering resilience in Japan, the increasing risk of severe natural disasters is unavoidable. With large-scale disasters such as an earthquake directly beneath the capital and the Nankai Trough mega-earthquake predicted, redundancy within a single region is insufficient. The utilization of eastern and western regions and true geographical dispersion combining cloud and on-premise environments are indispensable.

Furthermore, the "maintenance and operation of legacy systems" faced by many Japanese companies is a hidden vulnerability in resilience. In older architectures, rapid switching while maintaining data integrity is often difficult, which becomes a bottleneck for business continuity. Moreover, regarding compliance with the "Economic Security Promotion Act," while the institutional development phase has reached a certain milestone, it continues to be an important prerequisite for corporate management. Ensuring the transparency of data location and supply chains is also a crucial aspect of data resilience required of modern Japanese companies.

Geopolitical Risks Highlight Reality: The Case of AM-BITS

The importance of data resilience has become a more realistic challenge due to increasing geopolitical risks.

AM-BITS, an IT solutions company based in Ukraine, has provided systems for banks, telecommunications, and retail industries. However, against the backdrop of geopolitical turmoil, it was forced to quickly protect and migrate customer data.

Normally, migrating from an on-premise environment to the cloud takes more than six months. However, in critical situations, many companies do not have such time, and speed was critical for business continuity. To address this business continuity crisis, AM-BITS built a modern multi-tenant data and AI platform based on Cloudera. This allowed AM-BITS to quickly provide a "technical safe harbor" for customer data assets, reducing the time to securely migrate data to the cloud by 50%.

The important thing is not simply to migrate to the cloud. The flexibility to migrate while retaining the option to move to another cloud in the future, or even return to on-premise, has significant meaning from a business continuity perspective.

Failures are Not "Unexpected" but "Design Conditions"

Data-related failures and service interruptions will continue to be unavoidable. Therefore, companies must not treat failures as exceptional events but incorporate them as part of the design conditions from the outset.

The ability to continue operations wherever a failure occurs. The ability to recover while maintaining data safety and integrity. How to combine technology and processes for this will be an important theme in future IT strategies.

Data resilience is not an initiative for only a few advanced companies. It can be said to be a design philosophy that will become increasingly important for all companies seriously considering business continuity.

About Cloudera
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