Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Fabric

There is an aspect that I don’t often see discussed by business decision leaders when it comes to working with modern cloud technology: disaster recovery. Perhaps because many of us don’t think that something highly impactful will happen to us or our organization. The reality is that it is a matter of time. Aside from power outages, natural events, or hardware failure; there are two categories that all organizations are constantly exposed to: cyberattacks and human error. Sometimes those threats come from outside the organization and sometimes from inside.

Most of us have an understanding of cyberattacks – ransomware or data breaches – whereas human error can combine a great plethora of common situations to make a big impact in any organization, such as accidental deletion of data, misconfiguration of systems leaving unprotected data assets, default username and passwords, incorrect email address management or disclosure, password sharing to access systems, or mixing personal cloud resources with corporate ones.

What Microsoft Fabric Offers for Disaster Recovery

Microsoft Fabric provides several disaster recovery solutions to ensure business continuity in the event of regional disasters. Here’s how it can help:

1. Geo-Redundancy: By enabling Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR), your data is duplicated and stored in two different geographic regions, making it geo-redundant.
2. Failover: If a disaster affects the primary region, OneLake may initiate a regional failover to the secondary region, allowing you to continue accessing your data.
3. Data Replication: Data replication to the secondary region is asynchronous, which means any data not copied during the disaster is lost. However, this ensures that critical data is preserved and accessible.
4. Recovery Plan: In case of a disaster, you can follow a specific recovery plan that includes creating a new Fabric capacity in a new region, copying data from the disrupted workspace to the new one, and restoring items to their full function.
5. Soft Delete: OneLake soft delete protects individual files from accidental deletion by retaining them for a default retention period before permanent deletion.

Recovering from an Attack

In the event of a cyberattack or ransomware attack, Microsoft Fabric provides specific guidance for data recovery. Here’s a general outline of the steps you can take:

1. Identify the Impact: Determine which data and systems have been affected by the attack.
2. Isolate the Affected Systems: To prevent further spread of the attack, isolate the compromised systems from your network.
3. Assess the Damage: Evaluate the extent of the damage and identify which data needs to be recovered.
4. Restore from Backups: If you have backups in place, restore your data from these backups. Microsoft Fabric recommends keeping two Fabric Warehouse setups in separate regions and maintaining code and data parity by doing regular deployments and data ingestion to both sites.
5. Recreate Workspaces: Create a new Fabric capacity in a new region and set up a new workspace with the same items as in the affected workspace.
6. Copy Data: Copy the data from the disrupted workspace to the new one. For specific experiences like Data Engineering or Data Science, there are specific recovery procedures.
7. Restore Items to Full Function: Follow dedicated instructions for each component to restore items to their full function.
8. Implement Security Measures: After recovery, implement additional security measures to prevent future attacks, including training to users if needed.

Bear in mind that Microsoft provides recover experience guidance and disaster recovery processes and recommendations for Fabric Data Science.

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