Use defined recovery strategies to meet the recovery objectives

Defining a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy that aligns with your workload’s recovery objectives is essential for ensuring business continuity. This process involves selecting an appropriate recovery strategy, such as backup and restore, standby (active/passive), or active/active, based on specific business requirements.

Best Practices

Define Your Recovery Objectives

• Determine your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) based on business needs. RTO defines how quickly you need to restore your services after a disruption, while RPO defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. This step is crucial as it influences your disaster recovery strategy and resource allocation.

Choose an Appropriate Disaster Recovery Strategy

• Select a recovery strategy that aligns with your RTO and RPO. Options include: Backup and Restore (best for data-centric applications with high RPO), Standby (Active/Passive) setups (useful for critical applications needing quick failover), and Active/Active architectures (ideal for very high availability requirements). Assess the pros and cons of each to find the most cost-effective option that meets your reliability needs.

Implement Redundancy Across Locations

• Ensure that your DR solutions leverage multiple geographical locations to reduce the risk of regional disruptions. Use AWS services like Amazon S3, EC2, and RDS across different availability zones or regions to maintain backups and deploy applications. This geographical redundancy improves resilience and meets compliance requirements in many industries.

Regularly Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan

• Conduct regular disaster recovery drills to test your strategies and ensure that they are effective in real-world scenarios. This helps identify weaknesses, verify that your teams are familiar with the recovery process, and ensures that backup and restore procedures operate as expected. Document the results and update your plan as necessary to reflect changes in workload architecture or business needs.

Monitor and Maintain Your DR Solutions

• Continuously monitor the performance and integrity of your disaster recovery solutions using AWS CloudWatch and other monitoring tools. This ensures that backups are occurring as planned and that failover systems are operational. Regular maintenance checks will help address any potential vulnerabilities before they lead to failures.

Questions to ask your team

• Have you identified the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for your workloads?
• What disaster recovery strategies have you considered for your workloads?
• How often do you test your disaster recovery plans to ensure they work as intended?
• Are your backups stored in a separate location from your primary workload to enhance resilience?
• Have you documented your DR strategy and communicated it to all relevant stakeholders?
• How do you assess the cost-effectiveness of your disaster recovery strategy?
• What measures are in place to monitor the health of your disaster recovery environment?
• How do you plan to scale your DR solution as your workload grows or changes?

Who should be doing this?

Disaster Recovery Manager

• Develop and implement the disaster recovery strategy for workloads.
• Define recovery objectives (RTO and RPO) in alignment with business needs.
• Coordinate with stakeholders to assess recovery costs and probability of disruptions.
• Ensure that backup and recovery processes are properly documented and tested.
• Review and update the disaster recovery plan regularly to reflect changes in the environment.

System Administrator

• Implement technical solutions for backup and recovery, including configuration of services.
• Monitor the effectiveness of backup processes and perform regular integrity checks.
• Execute disaster recovery drills to validate recovery strategies.
• Assist in documenting the operational procedures for disaster recovery.

Business Continuity Planner

• Evaluate the business impact of potential disruptions and refine recovery objectives.
• Collaborate with IT to align disaster recovery plans with business continuity strategies.
• Engage with various departments to ensure all critical functions are covered in the DR plan.
• Facilitate training and awareness programs on disaster recovery for employees.

Security Officer

• Ensure that the disaster recovery plan includes security measures to protect data during recovery.
• Review backups for compliance with data protection regulations and organizational policies.
• Coordinate with IT on the secure storage and access of backup data.

Project Manager

• Oversee the planning and execution of disaster recovery strategy initiatives.
• Manage timelines, budgets, and resources allocated to DR activities.
• Communicate progress and status to stakeholders and escalate as needed.
• Ensure all teams are aligned and informed regarding the disaster recovery processes.

What evidence shows this is happening in your organization?

• Disaster Recovery Strategy Template: A structured template to outline your disaster recovery strategy, including objectives, recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO), and defined recovery strategies based on workload requirements.
• Disaster Recovery Plan: A comprehensive document detailing the processes and procedures to recover your IT systems and resume operations after a disaster, including roles, responsibilities, and communication plans.
• RTO and RPO Assessment Checklist: A checklist designed to help assess and define recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for different workload components based on business impact analysis.
• Disaster Recovery Playbook: A practical playbook offering step-by-step procedures for executing the disaster recovery strategy, including scenarios, activation procedures, and recovery tasks.
• DR Strategy Decision Matrix: A decision matrix to evaluate various disaster recovery strategies (e.g., backup and restore, standby, active/active) against criteria such as cost, complexity, and recovery objectives.
• DR Resource Location Diagram: A visual diagram depicting the locations of redundant workloads and backup resources to ensure geographical diversity and data integrity during disruptions.

Cloud Services

AWS

• Amazon S3: Provides scalable storage for backup and restore solutions, allowing you to store snapshots of your data and restore them as needed.
• AWS Backup: Centralized backup service to automate backups across AWS services, helping maintain backup compliance and meet disaster recovery objectives.
• Amazon RDS: Managed database service that includes features like automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and multi-availability zone deployments for high availability.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances for your application based on demand, supporting active/passive or active/active DR strategies.

Azure

• Azure Site Recovery: Disaster recovery as a service that helps ensure business continuity by orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of virtual machines and physical servers.
• Azure Backup: Provides backup and restore capabilities for Azure resources to protect against data loss and meet compliance and recovery objectives.
• Azure Blob Storage: Offers scalable object storage for unstructured data, which can be utilized in DR strategies via backup of critical application data.

Google Cloud Platform

• Google Cloud Storage: Durable and highly available object storage suitable for backup and restore solutions in disaster recovery plans.
• Google Cloud BigQuery: Serverless data warehouse that enables advanced analytics and can assist in promptly recovering lost data by maintaining copies of datasets.
• Google Cloud SQL: Managed SQL database service that offers automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and replication features for disaster recovery.