Did you know the disaster recovery solution market is projected to reach USD 115.36 Billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 34.5%, according to this research report conducted by market intelligence company, StraitsResearch?
Because disasters can strike anywhere and anytime, regardless of their type (natural, artificial, or technical failures). Experiencing losses due to unexpected disasters can be challenging for your business. That’s why most organizations, from SMEs to large corporations, are considering developing a cloud-based IT Disaster Recovery Plan to ensure their business runs smoothly in the event of a catastrophe. Rather than turning to traditional disaster recovery methods, these businesses prefer to use cloud-based solutions. Many market players offer cloud-based disaster recovery strategies, but AWS cloud is one of the top cloud service platforms. Because it provides various disaster recovery strategy options for small to large business organizations, you can select strategies according to your business industry, requirements, and budget.
In this article, you will get information about disaster recovery plans & strategies, and checklists available on the AWS cloud.
Disaster recovery refers to the process of preparing and recovering from a disaster. You must always be ready to manage unplanned adverse events to run your business smoothly. That’s why you need to plan, strategies, and test cloud-based disaster recovery strategies. Cloud-based disaster recovery strategies provide solutions implemented in the cloud with the help of a specific cloud service provider. Read below 3 points to know its importance more precisely:
These reasons would help you to know the rising demands of cloud-based disaster recovery strategies among business industries.
Implementation of any strategy requires a plan and checklist. You must also make a disaster recovery plan and tick mark the essential checklist to implement any cloud-based disaster cloud strategy. Generally, this plan must be part of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), which ensures business continuity during and after disasters.
The following 3 tasks will make things easy for you regarding adopting the cloud-based DRP.
Your first job is to understand your existing IT environment and assess the data, assets, and other resources. You must know everything, like where data has been stored, the cost of these data, and possible risks. Evaluation of the risks and threats can help you understand the possible types of disasters that might happen.
Your next job is to do business impact analysis to measure the business impacts of disruptions to your workloads. Simply put, find out the business operations constraints once disaster strikes. Additionally, do a risk assessment to learn the possibility of disaster occurrence and its geographical impact by understanding the technical infrastructure of the workloads. Don’t forget to consider these two essential factors:
Look at the below image to understand these factors more easily:
Image credit: Amazon AWS
Implementing disaster recovery on on-premise is different from implementing it in the cloud. To execute cloud-based disaster recovery effectively, you need to analyze your workloads. You must check your data centre connectivity if you have already deployed the workload on the cloud.
But, deploying your workloads on the AWS cloud would benefit disaster recovery implementation. AWS will take of everything from data center connectivity to providing fault-isolated Availability Zones ( an area to support physical redundancy), and regions.
The rising popularity of AWS is happening because of more than 20 AWS services available for disaster recovery. But every business has its objective, background, and technical infrastructure. Thus, you should know all options. AWS Cloud offers four major approaches for disaster recovery, shown in the following image:
Image: Disaster Recovery Approaches
Let’s understand each approach and all available AWS services within each approach.
Backup & Restore is a common approach for disaster recovery. Check the following table to learn more about it:
Check the following image to understand the backup and restore architecture on the AWS cloud.
Image: Backup and restore architecture
Pilot light is a second approach for disaster recovery through replication (continuous, cross-region, asynchronous). Check the following table to learn more about it:
Check the following image to understand the Pilot Light architecture on the AWS cloud.
Image: Pilot Light architecture
The warm Standby approach focuses on scaling. Check the following table to learn more about it:
Check the following image to understand the Warm Standby architecture on the AWS cloud.
Image: Warm Standby architecture
Multi-site active/active approach offers disaster recovery in multiple regions. Check the following table to learn more about it:
Check the following image to understand the Multi-site active/active architecture on the AWS cloud.
Image: Multi-site active/active architecture
It would be best if you made the right decision by selecting the appropriate strategy according to the business requirements. Still, consider the following points and check to decide the best one:
Image: Dummy data on AWS Health Dashboard
Here is a checklist that can help you to effectively design, develop, and implement disaster recovery plans and strategies. Consider it like a questionnaire for successful implementation:
In 2020, Thomson Reuter, a Global news and information provider, depended on the traditional Disaster recovery process, which was time-consuming and expensive. The company realized the need for modern cloud-based disaster recovery to improve data security and recover applications for one of its business units. They connected with Amazon AWS and AWS partner Capgemini and decided to implement AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to minimize data loss, downtime, fast recovery, and on-premises recovery. In 10 months, the company implemented this strategy on 300 servers. The automation of the cloud-based DR process provided them with the following outcomes:
See the below image to understand how AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery works. It is visible that it follows the simple process of recovering and replicating any data. In this case, the company also leveraged this work, but before that, they built an AWS Landing Zone to set up a secure and multi-account AWS environment to meet the security requirements. Afterward, they set up a recovery site in the cloud using the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery service. This new solution has started offering continuous data replication at minimum costs.
Image: Working of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
AWS cloud is not only used by this company but by many other companies as well for disaster recovery. With AWS cloud disaster recovery, you can make a quick recovery with minimal complexity, lower management overheads, and simple or repeatable testing. Analyze your requirements, and decide what disaster recovery strategy is best for you. With the right decisions, you can get these benefits for your business’s growth and smooth operation