CORE Disaster Recovery
Introduction
Telicent CORE is engineered for security, resilience, and reliability. However, even the most robust systems are susceptible to catastrophic failures, particularly when underlying infrastructure is compromised. Such events can lead to significant data loss, operational disruption, and severe business impact. To mitigate these risks and ensure business continuity1, we have implemented comprehensive disaster recovery mechanisms designed to protect the data stored within the various Smart Caches that comprise CORE—all without compromising data security or integrity.
As a fundamental part of this strategy, dedicated endpoints have been introduced to enable the systematic creation and restoration of backups when necessary.
Scope
This document outlines the disaster recovery strategy and design principles for Telicent CORE. It defines a unified approach to backup and restoration across all Smart Cache components. Detailed, component-specific implementation guides—including configuration and operational procedures—are provided separately.
Infrastructure-level disaster recovery (e.g., platform or network restoration) is out of scope and managed through separate processes.
Design and Approach
Our guiding principle is simplicity, aimed at minimizing the potential for confusion or operational error during critical recovery scenarios. Each Telicent CORE application is designed to expose a dedicated backup endpoint that supports the following essential operations:
- Create: Generates a snapshot backup of the current system state at the time of invocation.
- Restore: Restores the system to a specified backup instance.
- List: Returns a comprehensive list of available backups, along with critical metadata such as creation timestamps, unique identifiers, and size.
- Delete: Permanently removes the specified backup from the system.
These operations are exposed through secure endpoints, which are protected using robust access controls. This ensures that only authorized personnel or automated systems can perform backup and recovery tasks, maintaining the integrity and security of the data.
Smart Caches
While the general backup and recovery design applies consistently across all CORE components, each Smart Cache may differ slightly in terms of implementation details or data format. Please refer to the component-specific documentation for further information:
Current Capabilities
Currently, the disaster recovery functionality is designed to restore a Smart Cache to its most recent backed-up state. This means recovery will reflect the system’s condition at the point the latest backup was successfully created.
In the future, based on evolving client needs, we may expand this capability to support more granular restoration options—such as rolling back to a specific point in time (Point-in-Time Recovery - PITR)2.
Alternatives to Backup-Based Recovery
Backup and restore is not the only recovery method available. Depending on the use case, alternative approaches may be more appropriate:
Reload from Source Data
If the dataset is small and easily accessible, reloading all source data may be a faster and simpler option. In such cases, backup functionality may be unnecessary, as the system can be rebuilt entirely from the original inputs.
Reload from Knowledge
In scenarios where original source data is not readily available or impractical to re-ingest, it may be possible to regenerate the data by reapplying configurations, specific data transformation rules, or domain-specific business logic. While this may require manual intervention and deep understanding of the system’s processing, it can serve as a viable fallback method in certain cases.
Caveats
Backup data location
At the time of writing, the backups that are generated will not be exportable for either Smart Cache Graph or Smart Cache Search and are for internal system use only. In the future, we may - with sufficient security consideration; allow for the downloading and subsequent uploading of backup data but at present that is not the case.
Search configuration
By virtue of its use of ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, Smart Cache Search has the additional requirement that (a) manual snapshots be configured3 and (b) sufficient permissions/access be granted via file-system or S3 bucket for this purpose.4 The snapshot mechanics are described in more detail in the ElasticSearch online documentation5.
Summary
Telicent CORE’s disaster recovery strategy provides a clear, secure, and extensible framework for data protection and business continuity. It supports structured backup and restoration operations while allowing flexibility for alternative recovery paths when appropriate.