Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. Data Management

By John Tobin and Victoria Wang with Garrett Holthaus

Data management is the process of managing the data that your users and the company have entrusted to you, ethically and legally, while enabling your company to deliver services and value to your users. Data is one of a company’s most valuable assets and needs to be treated with appropriate safeguards and respect.

Many companies don’t think sufficiently about data management until something goes wrong, but like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, it’s too late to start caring about it then. Failures in data management are categorically different from other types of failures because remediation is so much harder, and frequently impossible. Data loss is permanent if you don’t have working backups, and data security breaches can’t be undone once the data has been exfiltrated. The trust and reputational damage caused by data loss or a data security breach can be immense and take years to recover from, if recovery is even possible. Real-world examples of poor data management are numerous, so instead we’ll focus on an example of a company that handled data management exceptionally well. On 9/11, Aon’s offices in the World Trade Center were destroyed, but the company’s excellent data management plan allowed it to start operating again within a few hours and without any data loss.

This chapter breaks down how to build a robust data strategy, using real-world insights from Google SREs. It’s ...