Data Security: 4 Most Important Questions to Ask Any Ag-Tech Provider
Data security breach. Cyber attack. Data security. We see these and other related words in our newspapers on a regular basis and we’ve all seen the implications a data security breach carries for both a software provider and its users, writes Agworld CTO David Eddy at PrecisionAg. It’s no surprise then that a growing number of people ask us about Agworld’s data security policies and practices when evaluating systems for their farm or agronomy business.
As Chief Technology Officer of Agworld, I deal with data security on a daily basis and know exactly what to look for, and which questions to ask, when considering a system that will contain any kind of farm or agronomy data. In order to help those that are currently evaluating systems, I have listed the four most important questions to ask any provider. These are all simple questions and the answers you receive should be straight forward; if they’re not, that will tell you enough.
1. Hosting and infrastructure
Is a redundant data hosting structure in place and is your data hosting scalable?
The hosting and infrastructure situation of any data platform is critical. All data should be redundant hosted in multiple data centers and hosting needs to be scalable based on user load.
Redundant hosting in geographically separated data centers ensures service continuity in the case of one data center having complete failure, for example in the case of a localized incident.
Hosting scalability is important to guarantee service during season demand peaks (when most agronomists perform their pre-season planning at the same time for example) and for when a significant number of new clients get onboarded. It’s not uncommon for this to cause regular outages with some providers.