Data Durability

How durable is your farm’s data?

You may have never asked yourself that question.  As more and more farms are getting comfortable with digital time tracking, a topic that comes up a lot is durability and security.  You should know what happens to your data from the moment it is recorded in the field through some future point in time when you'll want to look at that data to plan next season.  What happens when a phone can’t sync?  What if a server crashes?  How often do backups happen?  Is your data being backed-up frequently and securely?

A core concept at FieldClock is that our platform must help build trust between employees and employers.  Sometimes this means transparency (such as providing employee access via the FieldClock Employee Portal), but often it’s as simple as data durability.  For example, a picker wants to know that their piece was recorded and that there is no way for the recorded piece to “disappear”.

Durability in the Field

In FieldClock, durability starts at the device-level.  Whenever time or piecework is recorded on your employee's device, it is saved to persistent storage before being confirmed (audibly and visually) to the employee.  Once an employee hears or sees confirmation, they can rest assured that their time entry or piece will be preserved even if the battery died or the device crashed a moment later.

The data is then securely synchronized to the cloud. This happens automatically in most cases and can also be triggered manually if needed.  In extreme cases, data can also be exported as a text file so that it can be saved in the rare event a device becomes damaged or otherwise can’t sync.  Durability, and security in general, is a layered approach and it's important to have redundancies for different scenarios.

Durability in the Cloud

The real magic starts when the data is uploaded to the cloud.  Multiple copies of our customers’ data are stored across AWS datacenters in different physical locations.  If our primary database crashed, all traffic would be diverted to a “hot standby” (located in a separate datacenter) in less than a minute.  If that standby also crashed the traffic would divert to the other “hot standby” (located in a third datacenter).  All of the traffic reroutes automatically, all of your devices continue to sync, no data gets lost.

Having hot standbys ready to go at a moment's notice will probably be all we ever need, but we didn't stop there.  We set up automated systems to copy encrypted database backups to another datacenter over 2,000 miles away.  In the extremely unlikely event that Amazon suddenly lost all of its datacenters in the Pacific Northwest, your company's labor data would still be safe.

To be clear: it is ridiculously unlikely that we'll ever need to execute this disaster recovery plan -- but "unlikely" isn't safe enough when you're entrusting us with your farm's data.  You should know, not assume, that your data is safe.  With FieldClock, you know.  (And, if you're in our loyalty program, we put our money where our mouth is with an SLA.)

Why should I care?

If your farm is of a certain size, you may remember the days when you had to manage a server in your office.  It was probably in an IT closet and somebody had to put a backup tape in it every night and, let’s face it, you probably didn’t know for sure that the backup tape made it someplace safe or that you could even restore the contents successfully.  Hopefully this sort of experience is a distant memory.  If it’s not, you should probably talk to our sales team so that you can sleep easy without wondering if your farm’s labor data is safe.

If you've never been exposed to that scenario, breath a sigh of relief!  You may be large enough to have your own IT department, or small enough that you couldn't justify the expense or distraction of managing a system like that.

Regardless of the size of your farm, I'm here to let you know that we've put a ton of thought into how to keep your data safe so that you don't have to think about it.

-josh