Disaster recovery services help companies create a plan for the event of hardware failure, software errors or other disasters that may disrupt business operations. Having a disaster recovery plan in place can minimize the impact of these events, saving money and reputation, as well as providing peace of mind.
AWS offers a variety of DR strategies for your cloud infrastructure, depending on your RTO and RPO requirements. These include backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active/active. Each strategy has different costs and complexities.
Backup and restore is the most straightforward approach to DR for AWS workloads, but it doesn’t offer the lowest recovery time or RPO. With this method, you use Amazon S3 to back up your data, which is then available for restoration in the event of a disaster. The advantage of this approach is that it requires no extra infrastructure to maintain, and it’s easy to implement.
The next step up is the pilot light DR scenario, which uses a scaled-down version of your virtual environment in the cloud, always keeping it running and up to date. This DR solution can be easily scaled up during a disaster, helping you restore critical operations and applications. The service leverages Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to provide consistent, scalable, and secure environments. It also supports rapid deployment using AWS CloudFormation, which allows you to define and provision infrastructure resources as code, reducing setup and management time.
During normal operation, the pilot light system is passive and doesn’t serve traffic. When a disaster occurs, the primary site is brought down and the replica instance is powered on. Data is then replicated from the DR instance to the primary site, and once complete, you reverse the flow of replication to return the primary instance to its original state. The resulting failback process can be completed in minutes, and the original workload is restored in the same way as a backup.
For more complex or mission-critical workloads, you can use a warm standby DR architecture. This enables you to run a full secondary production system in the cloud, ready to serve traffic when needed. It’s more expensive than other DR options, but it helps you achieve the lowest RTO and RPO possible for your workloads.
Another option is to use multiple AWS regions or Availability Zones. This helps to mitigate the impact of extremely large-scale disasters that affect a single region or zone. You can also use Amazon CloudFront to distribute workloads across regions, increasing availability even more. And, of course, AWS offers a variety of tools and services for automated DR processing, which can help you reduce manual work and ensure consistency and reliability. You can use these tools to automate tasks such as backups, replication, and failover. This can help you reduce the risk of human error during these processes, which can impact your RTO and RPO goals. This is a key component of any successful DR strategy. aws disaster recovery services
