How Cohesity increases cyber resilience for MongoDB deployments

With over 50,000 customers, including 70% of the Fortune 100, MongoDB is one of the most popular modern databases with large enterprises. That’s due to its flexible schema, ability to handle massive, unstructured data, horizontal scalability through sharding, and support for high availability via replica sets. It’s ideal for dynamic, high-performance applications requiring rapid development and adaptability to changing data requirements.

Cohesity has long provided cyber resilience for MongoDB customers, delivering speed, scale, security, simplicity, and smarts for backup and recovery workflows.

Read below to learn how some of our most successful customers use our AI-powered data security platform, Cohesity Data Cloud, to secure and protect their MongoDB deployments.

A closer look at the MongoDB workload

MongoDB is in high demand due to its architecture, document-based storage model, and distributed nature, which are characteristics that bring unique challenges when it comes to delivering resilience, including:

1. Schema flexibility: MongoDB has a flexible schema, meaning that documents within the same collection can have different fields or data types. This flexibility adds complexity during backup and recovery, as data consistency is harder to ensure across documents.
2. Data consistency: MongoDB’s distributed architecture uses replica sets and sharding, which can complicate consistent backups across nodes. Data can change during a backup, especially in sharded clusters, which requires more advanced techniques (e.g., point-in-time snapshots or distributed consensus algorithms) to ensure consistency.
3. Sharding and distributed systems: MongoDB often operates in a sharded configuration, where data is distributed across multiple servers. Backing up a sharded cluster can be complex, requiring the backup of each shard and the config server while also ensuring consistency across all parts of the cluster.
4. Replication: In a MongoDB replica set, there is one primary node and multiple secondary nodes. Backups from secondary nodes must account for replication lag, where secondaries may not have the most recent data. Care must be taken to avoid inconsistency when the primary node’s writes haven’t propagated to all replicas.
5. Point-in-time recovery (PITR): Implementing point-in-time recovery in MongoDB is more complex because of its distributed nature. It requires careful management of the oplog (operations log), which captures all data changes to roll forward or back to a specific point in time.
6. File size and storage format: MongoDB stores data in BSON (Binary JSON) format, and the size of collections can grow quickly, especially with large documents. The format and size of the data require more storage resources for backups and can affect backup speeds.
7. Handling large datasets: MongoDB is designed to scale horizontally, which is ideal for large datasets. However, backing up large datasets distributed across multiple nodes or data centers can be time-consuming and require more bandwidth and resources.

Our engineering team has taken all this complexity into account and then some. Here’s how the Cohesity Data Cloud delivers impressive outcomes for the most demanding MongoDB deployments.

How Cohesity delivers speed, security, scale, simplicity, and smarts for MongoDB

We have found that organizations modernizing with the Cohesity Data Cloud often achieve superior outcomes in five key areas:

• Speed – They can recover from cyberattacks many times faster than their previous systems.
• Security – They improve their security posture, detect threats, protect data, and rapidly recover from cyberattacks.
• Scale – They can secure and protect their entire data estate on a single platform, even at a petabyte scale.
• Simplicity – They can run their data estate and perform backup and recovery workflows from a unified control plane and set of APIs.
• Smarts – They gain business and operational insights from their data with advanced AI capabilities.

More information about these outcomes is detailed below, including why they’re so important in MongoDB deployments.

Speed of recovery at scale

Enterprises with the largest MongoDB deployments trust Cohesity Data Cloud for their resilience. Cohesity’s backup and recovery processes are optimized for MongoDB’s document model, allowing for quick recovery of the MongoDB cluster, database, or specific collections without requiring a full database restore. The platform can increase and decrease parallel data ingest streams and control bandwidth utilization, enabling flexibility in meeting stricter SLAs with RPOs that can meet the demands of the enterprise. To minimize downtime, IT teams can restore critical data quickly without the delays associated with traditional database systems. This performance holds true even at scale—crucial criteria, especially for Fortune 500 and large dataset customers with billions of MongoDB objects.

Further, Cohesity Data Cloud employs incremental backup technology, which captures only the changes made since the last backup. With MongoDB’s flexible schema, the efficiency of Cohesity incremental backups allows for shorter recovery times due to the lesser amount of data needing to be processed. Our customers have told us that they decrease backup times by 45% and can quickly bring their MongoDB databases back online 97% faster.

These rapid restore capabilities are specifically tailored to handle the unique demands of MongoDB’s document-oriented architecture, providing an efficient and flexible solution that stands out compared to traditional database recovery processes. Organizations using MongoDB can respond swiftly to data loss events while ensuring minimal disruption to business operations. This tailored approach ensures MongoDB users remain resilient in an increasingly complex data landscape.

Resilient workflows for MongoDB with Cohesity Data Cloud include:

• Policy-driven, fully automated, turnkey solution
• Auto-discovery and registration
• Simplified backups and flexible restores
• Logical-backup solution and more

In our most recent release, we included support for zones and shard tags to boost the speed of cyber recovery. This approach efficiently guides read and write tasks to designated shards, enabling critical data to reside on shards in close geographical proximity to your application servers. As a result, the MongoDB backup connector now stores zone information, enabling the recovery agent to apply these zones before initiating data transfer—enhancing the speed and simplicity of the data recovery processes.

This flexibility allows organizations to choose the architecture that best meets their needs without being tied to a single cloud provider and manage it all from a single user interface. Deployment options included on-prem, public cloud, and hybrid as opposed to other sources that only allow on-prem or cloud. With Cohesity and MongoDB, you can get the best of both worlds.

What’s more, Cohesity supports both replicaset (non-sharded) and sharded MongoDB cluster protection. Other modern providers only support replicaset configurations, hindering your overall resilience.

Simple management interface

In the most recent release, we introduced a streamlined management interface for MongoDB environments, making it easier for administrators to perform backup tasks and monitor the health and status of MongoDB databases. This includes end-to-end lifecycle management of backups using a single pane of glass with a policy-driven approach.

Figure 1: Successful registration reflecting MongoDB-protected and unprotected objects.

Security: Enhancing data protection with multi-layered security measures

Cohesity Data Cloud offers robust security benefits that are essential for protecting sensitive data in today’s increasingly complex threat landscape. Like all other data sources protected by Cohesity, MongoDB enjoys multi-layer security defenses.

Defenses include Zero Trust Security principles, granular RBAC, MFA, SSO, immutable snapshots, privileged access management, and quorum.

For MongoDB specifically, we also provide additional security benefits such as:

1. Encrypting communication traffic in flight and at rest between Cohesity nodes and MongoDB.
2. Ensure authentication by connecting securely using SSL and SSL-enabled clusters.
3. Protect third-party encrypted MongoDB databases in the cluster.
4. Support for continuous data protection (CDP) for MongoDB.

These features enhance the security of MongoDB environments, providing organizations with the confidence necessary to protect their data and respond effectively to potential security incidents.

Smarts: Use AI-powered operational insights to drive performance improvements

Cohesity harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to elevate data management from a reactive process to a proactive, intelligent strategy. Our platform integrates AI-driven capabilities that enable organizations to make smarter decisions, enhance operational efficiency, and unlock valuable insights from their data. We include real-time visibility into data trends and usage patterns, empowering you to understand the true value of your data at a granular level and the ability to identify anomalies, predict potential issues, and optimize resource allocation, mitigating risks before they impact your business. Additional smarts we include:

AI-powered analytics:

• Intelligent auto-discovery gives users the ability to discover MongoDB assets with the ability to distinguish between topologies, to provide a comprehensive view of deployment.
• Smart backup allows backup selection of MongoDB primary, secondary, or secondary-only nodes or preferred nodes. Preferred nodes are required to restrict backup traffic from crossing LAN boundaries to WAN.

Real-life applications and use cases

Many enterprises are already reaping the benefits of integrating Cohesity with MongoDB community and enterprise editions, including some of the largest Fortune 500 brands.

By adopting Cohesity’s modern data platform, our customers have significantly sped up backup and data recovery, achieved strict SLAs, reduced storage costs, and centralized their monitoring and reporting—significantly improving their operational resilience.

Check out other important benefits you get when you use Cohesity Data Cloud for MongoDB workflows:

• With MongoDB’s flexible schema, Cohesity can efficiently do incremental backups that allow for shorter recovery times.
• Cohesity’s integration with MongoDB enables application-consistent snapshots, quiescing to verify data is accurately depicted across the cluster.
• The Cohesity and MongoDB integration is faster than the native OpsManager backup.
• Integrated capability to support future MongoDB releases, enabling your organization to react swiftly to the latest features and capabilities
• Added security with role-based access control to enable separation of duties mapping at the MongoDB source level
• Multiple site replication to allow you to meet predictable RTOs in catastrophic events.

Take the next step: Improve resilience for your MongoDB estate

Our approach to data management and recovery is uniquely positioned to address the specific challenges MongoDB users face. By using its robust features tailored for MongoDB’s document-oriented architecture, Cohesity enhances data resilience through rapid recovery processes that are both flexible and efficient. The ability to perform granular restores means that organizations can quickly recover individual documents or collections without needing a complete database overhaul, significantly reducing downtime in critical situations.

Meet us at AWS re:Invent

Please stop by Cohesity booth #526 at AWS Re-invent in Las Vegas, NV, from December 2-6. We would love to meet you.

Join us for a security breakfast:

On December 3rd, you are invited to join us for a “Security” breakfast with MongoDB, BigID, and industry experts from Cohesity and Natera, for an insightful panel on harnessing the power of AI while ensuring responsible and secure deployment. RSVP here.