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Data is becoming one of the most valuable business assets for small and medium-sized businesses, but only if you know how to use it. 

According to Forbes, 95% of businesses struggle with unstructured data, and Forrester reports that 73% of enterprise data goes unused for analytics. It's no wonder that 94% of leaders say they need to extract more value from the data they already have. 

Data lakes offer a solution to this. They centralize all your business data, regardless of format, into one scalable, accessible storage layer. Whether it's CRM records, sales reports, customer feedback, or even social media mentions, data lakes turn scattered information into a powerful decision-making tool.

What is a Data Lake?

A data lake is a central repository that stores vast amounts of raw data, both structured (CRM records, sales figures, or Excel spreadsheets) and unstructured (emails, PDFs, images, or social media posts). Unlike traditional databases, it doesn't require data to be cleaned or organized before storage, saving time and costs.

How Does a Data Lake Work?

1. Data Ingestion: Your raw data (structured and unstructured) is pulled in from multiple sources. These could be your website, POS system, social media, or third-party APIs.
   
   
2. Storage in Raw Format: This data is stored as-is in the data lake, without the need for immediate cleaning or formatting. Think of it as dumping everything into one central, scalable pool, usually in cloud platforms like AWS S3.
   
   
3. Data Cataloging & Indexing: Metadata (data about your data) is created to help organize and classify everything. This step ensures that users can easily search and retrieve relevant datasets when needed.
   
   
4. Data Processing & Transformation: When you’re ready to analyze, tools like AWS Glue or Amazon EMR process and transform the data into usable formats, cleaning, filtering, or reshaping it based on your specific needs.
   
   
5. Analytics & Insights: Once processed, the data is fed into analytics tools (like Amazon QuickSight or Power BI) for dashboards, reports, or machine learning models, powering smarter, data-driven decisions.
   
   
6. Access Control & Governance: Throughout, access is managed with permission settings and compliance protocols, so only the right people can access the right data, keeping everything secure and audit-ready.

As small businesses look to manage these growing volumes of data, two solutions often come up—data lakes and data warehouses. While both store data, they serve different purposes. Understanding these differences upfront is important for your business needs and future scalability.

How to Differentiate a Data Lake from a Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse stores data that is highly organized and structured for quick analysis. It requires predefined schemas, meaning you must know in advance how the data will be used before storing it.

On the other hand, a data lake stores data in its raw, unstructured format, offering much more flexibility. This raw data can later be transformed and used for various purposes, such as machine learning or business intelligence. 

The ability to store data without needing to define its structure upfront makes a data lake a more adaptable solution for small businesses that handle diverse types of data.

5 Key Benefits of Data Lakes for SMBs

When it comes to managing data, small businesses need solutions that are both affordable and flexible. A data lake provides just that, offering significant advantages to SMBs. Here are the key benefits that make data lakes a valuable investment for your business:

1. Cost Efficiency

One of the major advantages of data lakes is their cost-efficiency. Data lakes allow you to store raw, unprocessed data, eliminating the need for expensive data transformation upfront. This helps reduce both storage and ongoing maintenance costs.

Cloud-native platforms like Amazon S3, often used in data lake setups, follow pay-as-you-go pricing, charging as little as $0.023 per GB per month for standard storage. Azure Data Lake Storage offers similar models at around $0.03 per GB per month. 

With no upfront infrastructure costs, SMBs can build scalable, high-performance data lakes while keeping budgets predictable. Companies like Cloudtech help SMBs make the most of this model, architecting efficient data lakes on AWS that scale with your business and avoid unnecessary spend. 

2. Scalability

As your business grows, so does your data. A data lake for small businesses can scale easily to accommodate large volumes of data without a complete infrastructure overhaul. You can add more storage as needed without worrying about complex data migrations or reconfigurations, making it ideal for growing businesses with expanding data needs.

3. Flexibility

Data lakes support a wide variety of data types, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. This means you can store everything from transactional data to text files, emails, and social media content all in one place. With this flexibility, you can apply diverse analytics and reporting techniques, allowing you to uncover insights from every corner of your business.

4. Improved Data Accessibility

With a data lake, all your data is stored in one central location, making it easy to access and manage. Whether you're analyzing sales performance, customer feedback, or operational data, you can retrieve all the information you need without hunting through different systems or platforms. This ease of access can significantly improve decision-making and streamline your business processes.

5. Future-Proofing

A data lake for small businesses doesn't just solve today's data management challenges – it prepares you for the future. With the ability to integrate advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics, a data lake ensures your business is ready for tomorrow's innovations. As you evolve, your data lake can adapt to your changing needs, keeping you ahead of the curve.

With these benefits, it’s no surprise that more SMBs are investing in data lakes to stay agile, competitive, and data-driven. While a data lake offers tremendous potential for small businesses, it also presents certain challenges that need careful consideration.

What are the Challenges of Data Lakes?

The complexity of managing large volumes of data, ensuring data quality, maintaining security, and meeting compliance standards can overwhelm SMBs without the right approach. These factors are critical to unlocking the full value of a data lake, and neglecting them can result in ineffective data management, increased risks, and missed opportunities.

1. Data Governance: Organizing and cataloguing your data is crucial for maintaining its quality and accessibility. Without proper management, data can become difficult to analyze and prone to errors.
2. Security and Compliance: With sensitive data often stored in data lakes, strong security measures like encryption and access control are essential. Regular audits are also needed to ensure compliance with industry regulations.
3. Assessing Data Needs: Before adopting a data lake, evaluate the volume and variety of data your business generates. A well-aligned data lake will support long-term growth and scalability.

To address these challenges, selecting the right tools and technologies is essential for SMBs to effectively manage and maximize the potential of their data lake.

Tools and Technologies for Data Lakes in SMBs

To make the most of a data lake, small businesses need the right tools and technologies to simplify data management and drive valuable insights. Here are some key tools that can support your data lake strategy:

1. Cloud-Based Solutions: Platforms like AWS offer affordable, scalable cloud solutions for small businesses. These platforms allow you to store and manage large amounts of data with flexibility without the need for physical infrastructure. They also ensure security and compliance to protect sensitive data.
   
   
2. Data Orchestration Tools: Tools like AWS Glue and Amazon EMR help streamline data management by integrating, cleaning, and transforming data from multiple sources. These user-friendly tools save time on manual processes and ensure your data is ready for analysis.

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But tools alone aren’t enough. The data lake also needs to work in harmony with the systems you already use.

Integration with Existing Systems

One of the biggest advantages of a data lake for small businesses is its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing systems. Data lakes can easily connect with web APIs, relational databases, and other tools your business already uses. This integration enables a smooth data flow across systems, ensuring consistency and real-time data access. 

With partners like Cloudtech, SMBs can ensure their data lake integrates smoothly with existing business systems, avoiding silos and unlocking unified, real-time data access. Whether you’re using CRM software, marketing tools, or other business applications, a data lake can centralize and streamline your data management. 

Conclusion

Handling data efficiently is often a struggle for small businesses, especially when it's scattered across different systems. Without a unified system, accessing and making sense of that data becomes time-consuming and challenging. A data lake for small businesses solves this problem by centralizing your data, making it easier to analyze and use for better decision-making. This approach can help you identify trends, improve operations, and ultimately save time and money.

Cloudtech specializes in helping small businesses manage data more effectively with tailored data lake solutions. Their team works closely with you to create a system that streamlines data storage, access, and analysis, driving better insights and business growth.

Ready to simplify your data management? Reach out to Cloudtech today and discover how their data lake solutions can support your business goals.

FAQs

1. How does a data lake improve collaboration within my business?

A data lake centralizes data from various departments, making it easier for teams across your business to access and collaborate on insights. With all your data in one place, your employees can make informed decisions, leading to better teamwork and streamlined processes.

2. What are the security risks of using a data lake, and how can I mitigate them?

Data lakes store large volumes of sensitive data, which can pose security risks. To mitigate these, ensure robust encryption, access controls, and regular audits are in place. Working with cloud providers that offer built-in security features can also help protect your data.

3. Can a data lake help with data privacy compliance?

Yes, a data lake can be configured to meet various data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA. With proper governance and security protocols, SMBs can ensure that sensitive data is handled and stored in compliance with relevant laws.

4. How long does it take to implement a data lake for a small business?

The time required to implement a data lake depends on the complexity of your data and existing systems. With cloud-based solutions and proper planning, small businesses can typically implement a data lake in a few months, making it a scalable, long-term solution.

For small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), documents are the backbone of operations. Contracts, invoices, insurance claims, and loan applications hold critical information but often come buried under layers of text, handwriting, and complex formatting. Traditionally, extracting and processing this data meant hours of manual work and lost productivity. But with Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), that’s changing.

More than just document automation, modern IDP solutions use generative AI to quickly extract, understand, and process information with high accuracy. This means faster workflows, fewer errors, and less manual effort. 

With the IDP market projected to grow from $10.57 billion in 2025 to $66.68 billion by 2032, businesses are adopting these solutions to stay competitive. But what makes IDP so effective, and why should SMBs invest in it? Let’s take a closer look.

What is Intelligent Document Processing?

Intelligent Document Processing is an AI-powered technology that automates the extraction, classification, and validation of data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. It utilizes optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs) to interpret context, enhance accuracy, and minimize human intervention.

Why do SMBs turn to IDP? 

SMBs handle hundreds of invoices daily, printed, handwritten, PDFs, or images, often relying on manual data extraction for vendor names, amounts, and due dates. 

IDP automates this process by scanning invoices, extracting key details, and updating records instantly, minimizing errors and saving valuable time. Whereas, businesses looking to automate these processes often turn to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). 

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) uses software bots to handle repetitive, rule-based tasks, like copying data, filling out forms, or clicking through systems, just like a human would.

In order to convert the unstructured data (emails with order details, handwritten invoices, contracts, or customer support chat logs) and semi-structured data (invoices in different formats, bank statements, shipping labels, or survey responses) to usable information, IDP primarily serves as a key enabler for RPA. 

In simple terms, IDP extracts and organizes data from unstructured documents. This enables RPA to seamlessly execute follow-up actions, allowing SMBs to automate entire workflows with speed and accuracy.

How does IDP work?

IDP follows a simple step-by-step process:

1. Document Upload: Files are scanned or uploaded into a system like Amazon S3.
2. Classification: Data is sorted into categories (e.g., invoices, legal contracts) using IDP technology.
3. Data Extraction: It pulls out key information using AI-powered tools like Amazon Textract (for text and handwriting recognition), Amazon Comprehend (for natural language understanding), and Amazon Bedrock (for building and scaling generative AI applications). These tools, along with others, enable powerful data extraction and analysis capabilities.
4. Data Enrichment: The extracted information is processed further, removing sensitive details, tagging relevant data, or cross-checking with existing records. For example, extracting an invoice number and matching it with a vendor in your CRM.
5. Validation & Review: It's important to always keep a human in the loop for overall monitoring and verification, especially when the IDP encounters uncertainty with some data. A human reviewer can ensure accuracy and reliability before final processing.
6. Integration: The final, validated data is sent to business applications for processing, storage, or analysis.

This process enables companies to manage large volumes of paperwork effortlessly, unlocking faster decision-making, cost savings, and better compliance.

What are the top 4 use cases of IDP? 

Every industry has its share of paper-heavy processes. Some are buried in stacks of contracts. Others are drowning in forms that never seem to end. While SMBs have embraced digital transformation, many still struggle with legacy systems, compliance requirements, and unstructured data, making manual workflows a persistent challenge.

Here are some common use cases of how Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is making a difference across industries:

1. Healthcare

Hospitals and clinics generate mountains of paperwork every single day. From patient insurance claims to lab results, prescriptions, and discharge summaries, it’s a never-ending cycle. Manually entering this data slows down treatment, delays claim settlements, and increases the chances of human error.

With IDP, organizations from small clinics to large hospital groups can scan paperwork and have it automatically read, sorted, and organized, with no manual effort needed. For example, when a patient files an insurance claim for the treatment they received, IDP can read their documents and extract policy numbers, treatment details, and amounts in minutes.

IDP also works hand in hand with electronic medical records (EMRs), feeding structured data directly into EMR systems. This ensures faster documentation, better accuracy, and real-time access to patient information.

Here’s what you can expect with IDP in healthcare:

• Claims processed in hours, not weeks: Reduce claims turnaround time from 4–6 weeks to just 24–48 hours.
• Fewer documentation errors: Boost accuracy from 75% to 99.8%, minimizing costly mistakes.
• Faster compliance checks: Cut down review time from months to just 2 weeks, helping you stay audit-ready.
• Better fraud detection: Use AI-powered alerts to catch 50% more fraudulent claims before they’re approved.
  

2. Insurance

Insurance companies deal with multiple claims every single day. Many of these come in the form of handwritten documents, scanned medical records, EMRs, or multi-page reports. Reading through these manually is time-consuming and often leads to missed information or delays in approvals.

IDP can automatically scan all incoming claim documents, understand the context, extract key data like diagnosis, dates, and claim amounts, and flag anything suspicious. This speeds up the process significantly and helps detect any foul or fraud activities early.

Here’s what you can expect with IDP in insurance:

• No more manual data entry: Instantly extract claim details, policyholder info, and coverage terms with high accuracy.
• Faster claim approvals: AI models evaluate claim validity, cutting approval times from 4–6 weeks to just 24–48 hours.
• Fewer disputes, less fraud: Real-time cross-checking against contracts, medical records, and past claims helps reduce errors and flag fraudulent activity.

3. Legal

Legal work involves handling large volumes of documents that require precision and attention to detail. Lawyers and paralegals often dedicate significant time to reviewing contracts, agreements, and case files to ensure accuracy and compliance. 

Traditionally, these processes took weeks, and teams had to sift through hundreds of pages, flag inconsistencies, and ensure compliance. But with IDP, just a few hours.

Here’s how IDP helps with legal work:

• Rapid Document Analysis: Scans and analyzes 300+ pages of contracts in minutes.
• Accurate Clause Extraction: Extracts key clauses, obligations, and financial risks with 99% accuracy.
• Error and Discrepancy Detection: Flags missing signatures and discrepancies automatically.
• Accelerated Legal Review: With everything verified instantly, the legal team moved straight to negotiation, saving over 80% of the usual review time.
• Automated Draft Creation: Auto-generates first drafts of legal documents using pre-set templates, reducing drafting time by up to 72%.

With IDP verifying these instantly, the legal team moved straight to negotiation, saving over 80% of the usual review time. For legal teams at small and mid-sized firms, this means less grunt work, more strategy. For clients? Faster deals, lower costs, and airtight compliance.

4. Logistics

Small and medium-sized logistics companies handle a vast array of documents like shipping manifests, bills of lading, invoices, and customs declarations. Managing these manually can lead to delays, errors, and increased operational costs.​

By integrating IDP along with ERP or TMS systems (Transport Management Systems), logistics businesses can reduce manual data entry, expedite shipment processing, and improve compliance with regulatory requirements.​

Here’s how IDP helps small or medium-sized logistics businesses:

• Faster shipment processing: IDP can reduce document processing times by 50–70%, accelerating shipment handling and delivery schedules. ​
• Improved accuracy in documentation: Automation minimizes manual data entry errors, enhancing data quality and reducing discrepancies.
• Enhanced compliance: IDP ensures accurate data capture and storage, aiding adherence to regulatory requirements and reducing compliance risks.
• Cost savings: By automating document processing, businesses can achieve average savings of 25–40%, lowering operational expenses.

Conclusion

For SMBs drowning in paperwork, IDP isn’t just a convenience. It’s a competitive edge. By eliminating bottlenecks, reducing errors, and speeding up workflows, it transforms how organizations handle information.

Cloudtech is a platform that provides tailored cloud solutions that optimize IDP performance, ensuring seamless automation, secure data processing, and reduced operational costs. With expertise in serverless computing, data modernization, and resilient cloud architectures, Cloudtech helps SMBs process documents faster, improve security, and cut costs.

Cloudtech delivers custom-built cloud solutions that drive real business impact. Explore how Cloudtech can modernize your cloud environment and power intelligent automation at scale.

FAQs

1. Is IDP only for large enterprises?
   A: IDP is equally valuable for small and medium businesses. In fact, SMBs benefit even more by reducing manual work, saving time, and lowering operational costs with limited teams.
   
2. How does IDP actually help my small team?
   A: IDP automates repetitive tasks like data entry, document sorting, and verification. This helps your small team focus on more meaningful work, such as sales, support, or operations. It also improves accuracy and speeds up business processes.
   
3.  Is IDP secure enough for sensitive business documents?
   A: Yes. Most IDP solutions use strong encryption, access controls, and secure storage to protect your documents. Many are also compliant with data protection regulations to keep your information safe.
   
4. How is IDP different from Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
   A: RPA handles simple, rule-based tasks like copying, pasting, or clicking through screens. However, it cannot understand unstructured or messy data. In such cases, IDP steps in to read, understand, and pull out useful information from documents. It then passes the clean data to RPA so it can do its job. In short, IDP handles the thinking, and RPA does the doing.
   
   

Cloudtech, an Advanced Tier AWS consulting partner today announced that it has signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of the newly launched Small Business Acceleration Initiative (SBAI). This initiative, introduced at AWS re:Invent 2024, is designed to drive cloud adoption among small businesses by leveraging AWS Partner-led solutions and resources.

Cloudtech is one of the first 26 partners selected globally to participate in SBAI, reinforcing its commitment to empowering small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with cutting-edge cloud solutions. Through this agreement, Cloudtech will work closely with AWS to simplify cloud adoption for SMBs, providing them with tailored cloud migration strategies, cost optimization frameworks, and industry-specific solutions.Empowering Small Businesses with AWS Cloud

The AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) Competency, launched in January 2024, has already demonstrated strong growth, with participating AWS Partners achieving 35% higher YoY SMB business growth compared to non-certified partners. Building on this success, AWS has introduced SBAI to create a Partner-led channel sales motion, offering:

• Dedicated AWS supportthrough AWS Partner Territory Managers.
• SMB-focused marketing & sales enablement via AWS demand generation programs.
• Access to AWS Small Business Acceleration Package,a comprehensive resource hub for go-to-market strategies, sales plays, and packaged cloud solutions.

Cloudtech’s Role in AWS SBAIUnder the new SCA, Cloudtech will leverage its deep expertise in cloud transformation to accelerate AWS adoption among small businesses by:

• Offering tailored AWS solutions to simplify cloud migration and modernization.
• Providing strategic guidance
  to SMBs on optimizing cloud costs, performance, and security.

• Leveraging AWS co-marketing programs to educate and enable small businesses on cloud best practices.

“Small businesses are the backbone of innovation and economic growth. By joining forces with AWS under the SBAI, Cloudtech is committed to making cloud transformation more accessible, efficient, and scalable for SMBs in the USA,” said Kamran Adil, CEO of Cloudtech.

‍“This collaboration allows us to extend AWS’s world-class cloud capabilities to small businesses, helping them unlock new opportunities for growth and digital transformation.”Looking Ahead

With the AWS Small Business Acceleration Initiative launching on January 1, 2025, Cloudtech will actively engage with SMB customers, AWS Partner Territory Managers, and ecosystem partners to drive cloud adoption and business success.For more information on how Cloudtech helps small businesses accelerate their AWS journey, visit https://www.cloudtech.com/cloudtech-for-smb

‍About Cloudtech

Cloudtech is a boutique professional services firm that accelerates businesses on their cloud transformation journey by delivering curated modernization solutions. As an exclusive AWS partner, we specialize in helping businesses migrate and modernize their applications, optimize cost, security, and compliance across cloud infrastructures, and monetize data by building solutions that enable advanced analytics, ML, and GenAI applications.

For media inquiries, please contact:

‍Prerna Yadav

‍prerna@cloudtech.com

We are thrilled to announce that Cloudtech, a leading provider of cloud-based serverless solutions, has achieved the prestigious AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program. This notable accomplishment showcases our expertise in delivering cutting-edge search and analytics solutions using the AWS OpenSearch service.

The AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program

The AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program recognizes AWS Partners who possess technical proficiency, architectural expertise, and a successful track record of delivering projects utilizing the AWS OpenSearch service. Cloudtech’s achievement in this program underscores our commitment to delivering high-quality serverless cloud solutions to our valued clients.

What is AWS OpenSearch Service?

Formerly known as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, AWS OpenSearch Service is a managed, highly available, and fully compatible search service that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of the OpenSearch engine. Built on the popular Elasticsearch open-source project, AWS OpenSearch Service provides a seamless and feature-rich search experience, enabling businesses to index, search, and analyze vast amounts of data with ease.

Scalability and High Availability

AWS OpenSearch Service offers unmatched scalability, allowing businesses to handle any volume of data without worrying about infrastructure provisioning or performance bottlenecks. With the ability to horizontally scale clusters, organizations can effortlessly accommodate growing workloads, ensuring uninterrupted search functionality even during peak usage. Additionally, AWS OpenSearch Service ensures high availability by automatically replicating data across multiple Availability Zones, minimizing downtime and improving system resilience.

Robust Search and Analytics Capabilities

One of the primary advantages of AWS OpenSearch Service is its powerful search and analytics features. The service supports full-text search, enabling businesses to perform complex queries across large datasets and retrieve relevant results with lightning speed. With support for advanced search capabilities like fuzzy matching, faceted search, and geospatial queries, organizations can unlock valuable insights hidden within their data. Moreover, AWS OpenSearch Service seamlessly integrates with popular analytics tools like Kibana, empowering users to visualize and explore data through rich dashboards and visualizations.

Easy Integration and Data Ingestion

AWS OpenSearch Service simplifies the process of ingesting data from various sources into the search engine. It supports numerous data ingestion mechanisms, including bulk indexing, real-time streaming, and integrations with other AWS services like AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis. This flexibility allows businesses to ingest data in real-time, ensuring that the search index remains up-to-date and aligned with the latest information.

Security and Compliance

AWS OpenSearch Service places a strong emphasis on data security and compliance. It integrates seamlessly with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), enabling granular access control and ensuring that only authorized users can interact with the search infrastructure. Additionally, the service provides encryption at rest and in transit, ensuring that data remains protected throughout its lifecycle. AWS OpenSearch Service is also compliant with various industry standards and regulations, making it suitable for organizations with strict compliance requirements.

Cost-Effectiveness and Pay-as-You-Go Model

AWS OpenSearch Service follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where organizations are billed only for the resources they consume. This approach eliminates the need for upfront investments in hardware or infrastructure, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, the managed nature of the service reduces the operational overhead associated with self-hosted search deployments, enabling teams to focus on leveraging search capabilities rather than managing infrastructure.

At Cloudtech, we pride ourselves on our dedicated team of cloud architects and engineers who possess extensive knowledge of the AWS platform. Their expertise, combined with our successful implementations of AWS OpenSearch solutions across diverse industries, allows us to optimize your search capabilities, improve data exploration and analysis, and drive better decision-making for your organization.

As an AWS Consulting Partner, Cloudtech has a strong foundation in delivering cloud-based solutions that drive digital transformation. Our achievement in the AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program further solidifies our position as a trusted provider of serverless cloud solutions.

We extend our gratitude to our valued customers and partners for their ongoing support and trust in our capabilities. Cloudtech remains committed to empowering your organization with cutting-edge cloud technologies and delivering exceptional results.

Let’s Connect

To learn more about how Cloudtech can help optimize your search and analytics capabilities using the AWS OpenSearch service, please contact our team of experts at opensearch@cloudtech.com. Visit our website cloudtech.com to explore our comprehensive range of cloud-based solutions.

Thank you for being a part of Cloudtech’s journey to excellence

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We are pleased to announce that we have achieved Amazon Service Delivery designation for AWS API Gateway Service, recognizing that Cloudtech Inc follows best practices and has proven success delivering AWS services to end customers.

This is a small achievement in a long list of goals for Cloudtech Inc as it differentiates Cloudtech Inc as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that provides specialized demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in delivering API Gateway Services. To achieve this designation, Cloudtech Inc passed a rigorous technical validation performed by AWS Partner Solutions Architects who are experts in this service. They review prior case studies and architecture to ensure all the best practices are implemented in the project. Earlier We earned AWS Service Delivery Designation for Lambda Delivery. As an AWS Lambda Service Delivery Partner, Cloudtech Inc provides services and tools to help customers build or migrate their solutions to a microservices architecture running on serverless computing, allowing them to build services and applications without the need for provisioning or managing servers.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for startups to global enterprises. To support these solutions’ seamless integration and deployment, AWS established the AWS Service Delivery Program to help customers identify APN Consulting Partners with deep experience in delivering specific AWS services.

As an AWS API Gateway Service Delivery Partner, Cloudtech Inc will provide tools and services to help customers build, secure, and manage APIs, and API-driven architectures, at any scale.

Cloudtech Inc is always happy to help you at any time,  if you have any queries or questions, you can schedule a free call with our representatives and they will guide you further.

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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?

What do you think is causing it to rise?

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.

Why do you need cloud-based disaster recovery strategies?

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:

• You can save your security budget by investing in an entire disaster recovery site and paying as per use.
• You can access and recover any on-premises and cloud-based software and applications in case of a disaster in seconds from the cloud.
• You can minimize downtime and data loss along with on-time recovery.

These reasons would help you to know the rising demands of cloud-based disaster recovery strategies among business industries.

Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

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.

Task 1: Know your infrastructure

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.

Task 2: Conduct a business impact analysis and risk assessment

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:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – It refers to the maximum time (acceptable delay), an application can stay offline after the disaster to its recovery.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – It refers to the maximum time (adequate time) for which you can bear data loss from your application. In other words, find the lost time between service interruption and the last recovery point.

Look at the below image to understand these factors more easily:

Image credit: Amazon AWS

Task 3: Know your workloads to implement disaster recovery in the cloud

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.

• Go for a single AWS Region if you have high workloads, as you will get different availability zones.
• Go for multiple AWS Regions if there is a possibility of losing various data centers far from each other.

Disaster recovery strategy options in AWS Cloud

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.

(1) Backup & Restore

Backup & Restore is a common approach for disaster recovery. Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Mitigate data loss and corrupted data
• Replicate data to AWS regions
• Mitigate lack of redundancy for workload deployed to a single Availability Zone

What you need to consider

• Use Infrastructure as code (IaC) for deployment, and for this, consider AWS CloudFormation or AWS Cloud Development Kit.
• Develop a Backup strategy using AWS Backup
• Create Amazon Ec2 instances using Amazon Machine Images
• Automate redeployment using AWS CodePipeline

Available AWS Services

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshot
• Amazon DynomoDB backup
• Amazon RDS snapshot
• Amazon EFS backup
• Amazon Redshift snapshot
• Amazon Neptune snapshot
• Amazon DocumentDB

Check the following image to understand the backup and restore architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Backup and restore architecture

(2) Pilot Light

Pilot light is a second approach for disaster recovery through replication (continuous, cross-region, asynchronous). Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Helps you to replicate data from one Region to another region
• Allows you to work on your core infrastructure and quickly provision a full-scale production environment through scaling servers and switching on

What you need to consider

• Automate IaC and deployments to deploy core infrastructure at one place and across multiple accounts and Regions
• Use different accounts per Region to offer the highest level of security isolation and resources

Available AWS Services

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Replication
• Amazon Aurora global database
• Amazon RDS read replicas
• Amazon DynamoDB global tables
• Amazon DocumentDB global clusters
• Global Datastore for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
• For Traffic Management
• Amazon Route 53
• AWS Global Accelerator

Check the following image to understand the Pilot Light architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Pilot Light architecture

(3) Warm Standby

The warm Standby approach focuses on scaling. Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Ensure the scaling and fully functional copy of the production environment in another Region
• Offers quick and continuous testing

What you need to consider

• Scaleup everything which needs to be deployed and running
• Since it is similar to the Pilot Light approach, consider factors, RTO & RPO for selecting one from these.

Available AWS Services

• You can use all AWS services mentioned in the above two approaches for data backup, data replication, infrastructure deployment, and traffic management.
• Use AWS Auto Scaling for scaling resources

Check the following image to understand the Warm Standby architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Warm Standby architecture

(4) Multi-site active/active

Multi-site active/active approach offers disaster recovery in multiple regions. Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Helps you to recover data in various regions
• Reduce recovery time but also offer a complex and expensive approach

What you need to consider

• Don’t forget to test the disaster recovery to know how the workload responds to the loss of a Region
• You need to work more on maintaining security and avoiding human errors

Available AWS Services

• Like Warmup Standby, you can use all AWS services mentioned in the above three approaches for data backup, data replication, infrastructure deployment, and traffic management.

Check the following image to understand the Multi-site active/active architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Multi-site active/active architecture

How to choose a suitable strategy

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:

Points to consider

• AWS divides services into two categories – the data plane to offer real-time services and the control plane to configure the environment. It is suggested that you should go with data plane services to get maximum resiliency.
• Choose the Backup & Restore strategy options if you need only backup of workloads and restorage with the single physical data center. Besides this requirement, you can choose from rest 3 strategies.
• The first 3 approaches are active/passive strategies which use an active site like AWS Region for hosting and serving and a passive site (another AWS Region) for recovery.
• Regular testing and updating of your disaster recovery strategies are vital. You can take the help of AWS Resilience Hub to track your AWS workload.
• Use AWS Health Dashboard to get up-to-date information about the AWS service status. It provides a summary like the below image:

Image: Dummy data on AWS Health Dashboard

Tick-make this checklist for your DRP and strategies implementation

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:

Have you figured out recovery objective (RTO / RPO)?Have to found the stakeholder lists which needs to update once disaster strike?Have you established the essential communication channels during and after disaster events?Have you collected all business operations and IT infrastructure documents?Have you defined any procedure to manage incidents or actions?Have you performed testing of your strategies? Use AWS Config for monitoring the configurations.Does your documentation are up-to-date?

Case study – How Thomson Reuters got benefits after implementing AWS cloud-based disaster recovery approach

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:

• Replicated over 120 TB of data from 300 servers
• Setup a recovery site in the cloud
• Eliminate its manual DR process
• Optimized spending on its DR process
• Enhanced security and data protection

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

Closing Thought

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

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