A disaster recovery plan is a combination of steps and procedures designed to assist a company or organization recover in the advent of a disaster , be in natural ( flood, fire or earthquake ) or man-made (widespread system failure, terrorism or ransomware attack).A comprehensive and well executed DRP must lay down clearly the chain of action to be taken , before , during and after the disaster.
Looking at Amazon Web Service , you can clearly see that it has been designed to be highly available through a comprehensive and well though DR strategy via the implementation of regions and Availability Zones. As of today, the AWS infrastructure is spread across 26 Region and 84 Availabilities zones with 8 more regions and 24 more AZ to be added.
For more information regarding that check the link here
I'm pretty sure we have all see the famous article from The Economist with the headline " The world's most valuable resources is no longer oil, but data ",this show how important data is and how critical it is to keep its " integrity" and "availability " at all cost . and only a well planned and executed RDP can make that happen.
When planing a DRP, the two key aspect to consider are RPO ( Recovery Point Objective and RTO ( Recovery Time Objective)
RPO is your goal for the maximum amount of data an organization can afford to loose while RTO is the maximum time frame an organization can forgo before normal operations are resumed.
Depending on how important your data is for your company , you may decide to either implement RPO or RTO. I have seen cases where companies decide de to implement both. A high frequency trading company on WallStreet will rather opt for the shortest RTO for their critical while being a little lenient on RPO for less critical servers storage used for archival.
Before the advent of cloud, 0 RPO and 0 RTO was near impossible to implement even for bigger organization , now it is a thing thanks to AWS's Multi-site active/active strategy. To learn more about AWS DR Architecture, click here.
Personal DRP
You can implement your own DRP at home or at your small business too if your organization hasn't fully embraced the cloud yet but applying the 3-2-1 rules of data backup:
- 3 Copies of your Data, from that 1 copy of your production data
- 2 Copies of your backup data on two different type of media ( HDD or Magnetic Tape )
- 1 Copy of the backup data to be stored offsite. ( Storage, car truck or AWS S3)
This will not significantly improve your RPO and RTO but will at least give you some peace of mind.
Store it Longer and Prosper in cloud
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