When planning to utilize AWS for disaster recovery (DR) solutions, there are several important considerations to keep in mind. These considerations will help ensure that your DR strategy is robust, cost-effective, and aligned with your business objectives.
Assessment of Business Needs
- Criticality Analysis: Identify critical workloads and the potential impact of their downtime. This helps in prioritizing resources for your DR strategy.
- Compliance Requirements: Ensure that your DR solution complies with industry regulations and standards that apply to your business.
Once the business needs are clear and objectives are defined, it will lead you to define two significantly important parameters : RTO and RPO. Let’s have a look briefly…
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- RTO can be defined as the maximum allowable duration of downtime after a disaster strikes, within which a business process must be restored to ensure continuity.
- The RTO helps organizations determine the urgency with which they need to recover their IT and business operations after a disruption.
- A shorter RTO implies a need for more robust and immediate recovery mechanisms, which can be more expensive. Take an example: If an e-commerce company sets an RTO of 2 hours for its online shopping platform, it means the platform must be operational within 2 hours of going down to avoid unacceptable consequences, such as loss of revenue and customer dissatisfaction.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- RPO indicates the maximum tolerable data that can be lost in terms of time.
- RPO helps in defining the frequency of backups. It is a critical parameter for data-centric applications where data loss can result in significant business damage or compliance issues.
- A lower RPO requires more frequent backups and typically incurs higher costs due to the increased storage and resources needed. Example: If a financial institution has an RPO of 30 minutes, it needs to back up its data at least every 30 minutes. This ensures that in the event of a system failure, the institution will lose no more than 30 minutes of transaction data.
Let’s have a look at the AWS service which helps with DR.
AWS DRS Offers Various Strategy Choices
AWS Disaster Recovery Services, a set of capabilities and services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to help businesses prepare for and recover from disasters that could cause data loss or downtime
Strategies
This is the simplest form of DR that involves regularly backing up data and applications either directly in AWS or from on-premises to AWS. In the event of a disaster, these backups can be used to restore the data and applications to a point in time before the disaster occurred.
- Tools and Services: AWS Backup, Amazon S3, and Glacier for storage; AWS DataSync or AWS Storage Gateway for data transfer.
- Use Cases: Ideal for non-critical data with flexible RTOs where downtime is less of an issue and cost-efficiency is a priority.
- Pros: Cost-effective, simple to implement; suitable for less critical data
- Cons: Longer recovery times; not suitable for mission-critical applications
Pilot Light
The pilot light method involves maintaining a minimal version of the environment always running in the cloud. The core elements of the system, like databases, are continuously replicated to AWS, while the remaining environment can be quickly provisioned when needed.
- Tools and Services: Amazon EC2 for server replication, Amazon RDS for database replication, and AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure setup.
- Use Cases: Suitable for applications where the core services need to be recovered quickly, but full-scale operations are not constantly required.
- Pros: Minimal running costs; quicker recovery than backup and restore
- Cons: Requires more time to scale up during a disaster
Warm Standby
Warm standby involves a scaled-down but fully-functional version of the environment that runs in AWS at all times. This environment can be scaled up to a full production load when the primary site fails.
- Tools and Services: Auto Scaling to adjust capacity, Elastic Load Balancing to distribute incoming traffic, Amazon Route 53 for DNS routing.
- Use Cases: Best for critical applications where RTOs need to be short but not immediate. Offers a good balance between cost and speed of recovery.
- Pros: Rapid failover; system is always running at reduced capacity
- Cons: Higher cost due to constant operation; still involves downtime
Multi-Site Solution/Active-Active
In an active-active setup, the workload is distributed across two or more active locations, usually in different AWS regions. All locations are capable of handling production traffic, significantly enhancing availability and fault tolerance.
- Tools and Services: Amazon Route 53 for DNS and traffic management, Multi-AZ and Multi-Region deployments in services like Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB for data redundancy.
- Use Cases: Essential for mission-critical applications requiring instant failover (zero RTO) and zero data loss (zero RPO), where downtime or data loss cannot be tolerated.
- Pros: Highest availability; no downtime as traffic can be rerouted instantly
- Cons: Most expensive; complex setup and maintenance
Various Use Cases Addressed by AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
Following are top level representation of different DR scenarios. We will elaborate on in details on each one in following blogs.
Takes care of making your local datacenter DR using AWS Cloud.
- Very effective near real time data replication
- Seamless failover in case of incident
- Failback option available to restore the datacenter
No worries even with one of the AZ is down, your workload is taken off with Cross AZ DR.
Even if the entire region is inaccessible, your customers / users still can access workload seamlessly.
AWS offers a comprehensive set of services and tools designed to facilitate effective disaster recovery (DR) solutions for on-premise or on-cloud infrastructure by leveraging the AWS cloud. This involves setting up and managing replication, backup, and
recovery processes that enable businesses to quickly recover from a disaster by transitioning their IT operations to AWS. Get your assessment done today !! Minutus Computing can help safe guard your business with disaster recovery solutions !! Contact us sales@minutuscomputing.com