Why Choose AWS for Disaster Recovery

Posted by alvina on February 27th, 2018

The data in any organization can be at risk due to any kind of unforeseen disasters like earthquake, flood, hardware failure, data breaches, attacks by ransomware etc. This has led to the emergence of the backup and recovery of the data. AWS provides an efficient way to mitigate the impact of any such natural or human-induced unforeseen circumstances on the business processes of an organization through its AWS backup and disaster recovery. This is achieved in a cost-efficient way and ensures high tolerance towards a disaster that enables the business to continue its operations without any obstruction.

AWS disaster recovery deals with the planning and recovery from a disaster. The systems are designed to face failures.

There are certain ways to make the most of AWS, which are:

1. Organisations resort to multiple data centers at multiple locations, in order to protect their data in case of any failure, which increases the cost incurred by the organization to sustain them as well as these infrastructures remain unutilized in the normal situations.

AWS DR enables consolidation of sites that prevents the need for maintaining many data centers and cuts the costs of the maintaining the network connectivity, personnel, and other equipment. It enables for scaling up of the infrastructure as per requirement that provides flexibility and optimized use of resources during a disaster.

2. AWS disaster recovery solution for an application is dependent upon the recovery time objective and recovery point objective. The time required for continuation of the normal operating levels is termed as RTO.

The time needed for data recovery is RPO.RTO and RPO depend on the industry and business size. AWS DR solutions ensure failover to a different work environment that ensures high availability of resources during a disaster.

Strategies used in AWS DR:

1. The Backup and Restore strategy:

This is apt in the absence of a DR plan and for lower level business-critical applications. This is the most cost-efficient way of backing up the data. It generally takes time to restore data from the tapes in the on-premise data centers after a disaster. By using AWS backup and disaster recovery, the data is stored in the Amazon S3 storage from where it can be recovered quickly.

For a large amount of data, AWS Export/import or AWS Snowball can be used to store the data on Amazon S3.

A further reduction in the expenses in this strategy is possible by the use of compression and de-duplication tool

2. The pilot light strategy:

It is apt for DR solutions that need alow RTO and RPO. In this strategy, the smallest version of an environment always runs in the cloud. AWS does this by configuration and execution of the essential core elements of the system.

When the data has to be recovered, a full-scale production environment can be provisioned around the critical core.

3. Warm Standby Strategy:

It is an extension of the Pilot light strategy and is apt for core business-critical purposes in which the RTO and RPO are in minutes. While planning a DR, the essential points of the on-premise data center need to be identified and then duplicated inside the AWS.

During a disaster, the traffic is diverted to the infrastructure present in the AWS and by scaling it, a fully operational production environment can be created with minimum RTO and RPO.

It is comparatively costlier than Backup and Restore strategy and the Pilot Light strategy.

4. Multi-Site strategy

This is suitable for an infrastructure that runs totally on AWS and on-premise data center. Here the data is replicated to the AWS infrastructure.One part of the traffic is redirected to the AWS infrastructure and other to the on-premise data center.

This strategy is apt for critical applications with low RTO and RPO which need minimum downtime. It is the most expensive method.

AWS DR is highly recommended because of its cost-efficiency, instant elasticity, flexibility and secure way to restore the data and ensure smooth flow of business operation in case of a disaster.