For organizations in industries handling sensitive, highly regulated data, secure and efficient database replication is critical.

Whether dealing with customer records, financial data or proprietary information, organizations need a reliable way to move that data across systems without risking compliance violations or security breaches. But it’s not just about moving data — it’s about doing so with minimal disruption, ensuring real-time access and meeting strict regulatory requirements like GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA. 

For businesses, the challenge is maintaining control over their data while avoiding the complexities of manual processes and potential security risks. There are times when a company has dictated that a sensitive dataset cannot be processed by third parties. This requires data teams to embark on resource-intensive DIY projects or build, maintain and manually update self-hosted solutions. These result in high overhead costs with less than ideal manual, ongoing maintenance requirements. This is where Fivetran comes in. Our Hybrid Deployment model allows organizations to replicate their databases securely while keeping sensitive data in their own environment. 

With Fivetran's newest innovation, Hybrid Deployment, your data remains within your private network, while Fivetran's platform serves as a unified control plane for all of your data movement. This separation of data and control planes allows enterprises to securely move data without needing to manage or maintain a complex data infrastructure. Fivetran's control plane offers an easy interface to deploy, monitor and version control pipelines while a lightweight local agent installed in your environment handles data pipeline processing.

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Simple steps to streamline database replication 

Database replication has many benefits, including improved disaster recovery, lower data latency and reduced server load. The sooner you replicate your databases, the sooner you protect your data and improve data availability and accessibility — leading to deeper business insights. Here’s how to get started step by step.

1. Consider your data sources

First, take stock of all your data sources. Organizations need a platform that can move all of their data — not just their most common sources like Salesforce and Google Analytics — but bespoke and hard to access sources like Oracle and SAP as well.

2. Determine your data security regulations

With the cost of a data breach estimated at $4.88 million in 2024, some organizations want to avoid introducing risk to their pipelines by avoiding action. But that avoids deeper insights into data and better business outcomes. Modern data movement solutions like Fivetran introduce comprehensive security features that give enterprises the ability to move their most sensitive data regardless of regulatory requirements, internal protocols or data concerns. So begin database replication by ensuring your security protocols are up to date and shared widely across teams. 

3. Develop your data movement project plan

As you prepare for data movement, it’s important to have a plan in place so that everyone involved is on the same page and knows what to expect and when to expect it. 

Your data movement plan should include:

1. Define project goals. Determine the project’s timeline, stakeholders, budget, projected milestones and objectives. 
2. Prepare your data. Eliminate duplicates and inconsistencies that you find. 
3. Test and validate. In a controlled environment, test your migration and address any issues. 
4. Migrate your data. Follow your plan and move your data, monitoring it closely. 

4. Configure your local environment

Rather than maintaining multiple solutions or having to build homegrown solutions, which cost your team time and money, Fivetran’s Hybrid Deployment model enables you to move all data, including your most sensitive databases. With Fivetran's Hybrid Deployment, you decide where your pipelines run, either through Fivetran's secure network or in your own environment. This means you can move all of your data, regardless of security protocols, all from one solution.

You use Fivetran's control plane — a single interface that allows users to manage all data sources in their environment — to build, maintain and quality control all of your data pipelines, including self-hosting sensitive databases and SaaS applications, like Salesforce, in your own environment. 

To do that, the first step is to set up your local environment:

1. Ensure you have the memory, storage and CPU needed to replicate your databases. You can find those requirements in our Hybrid Deployment Setup Guide. 
2. Choose your container software, like Podman, Docker or Kubernetes (soon to be supported). 

5. Set up your hybrid deployment agent

In order to run the pipelines securely in your own environment, Fivetran deploys a lightweight hybrid deployment agent. This agent is easily deployed using your preferred container software and is configurable to your liking. The agent does not communicate any sensitive information back to the Fivetran platform at any point of the process.

For detailed instructions on creating, installing and verifying agent status, see our Hybrid Deployment setup guide. 

6. Finalize your destination setup

Choose the destination where you want to centralize all of your data. Fivetran supports cloud data warehouses, databases, online data platforms and data lakes as destinations.

7. Setup your connectors

Fivetran’s Hybrid Deployment supports a number of connectors — like Salesforce, Oracle and Amazon S3 — with more rapidly being released. Our connectors have a 99.9% uptime, CDC, self-healing properties and can handle your high volume, real-time database replication needs. During the setup process, you assign the desired hybrid deployment agent to the connector, allowing you to dictate where the data will land. 

You can view all the connectors that Fivetran’s Hybrid Deployment supports in this list. 

With just a few easy steps, you have now implemented a database replication strategy that helps you move all of your data, regardless of your security concerns, from any source to any destination with all security protocols accounted for.

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