Disaster Recovery Plan at AWS

Power outage, hacking or system failure…

Recovery on AWS: Ensuring Your Business Continuity

Have you ever considered the cost of disruption to your systems? At BigCheese, we understand the importance of business continuity and the security of your data. That’s why, in partnership with Amazon Web Services(AWS), we offer your company tangible incentives, translated into development hours, to implement a solid Disaster Recovery Plan.

What is an Amazon Web Services Disaster Recovery Plan?

An AWS Disaster Recovery Plan is a strategy designed to ensure service continuity and data recovery in the event of a cyber-attack, disaster or outage. It involves replication of critical data and systems across multiple AWS geographic locations to mitigate risk. When an adverse event occurs, such as a power outage, hack or system failure, the plan is automatically activated, enabling rapid restoration of services and minimizing downtime.

The Cost of Inactivity

Have you sized the cost of systems downtime in your company? According to a Gartner study, the average cost of IT downtime and unavailability for a company is approximately US$ 5,600 per minute. In a world where end-customer expectations are growing and shifting towards an “always on, always available” mentality, resilience is critical.

Calculating the cost of disruptions in the event of a disaster or incident is an important process in business continuity management and disaster recovery planning. Here is a general guide to calculate this cost:

1. Identify the critical elements of the business: First, you must identify the systems, applications, processes and services that are critical to the operation of your company. These are the elements that, if disrupted, would have a significant impact on operations and customer satisfaction.
2. Determine the tolerable downtime: Define the period of time your organization can tolerate without access to the identified critical elements. This aligns with the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) discussed below. The shorter the RTO, the shorter the tolerable downtime.
3. Calculate the cost of downtime: To determine the cost of downtime, you must consider several factors, which may include:

• Revenue loss: Calculate how much money would be lost for each minute or hour of inactivity based on average revenue per unit of time.
• Additional operating costs: Identifies additional costs incurred during the downtime period, such as the cost of overtime for employees who must work on the recovery, the cost of third-party services, etc.
• Productivity loss: Evaluates how much work time and productivity would be lost during the interruption.
• Customer loss: Consider how many customers might abandon your business due to the disruption and calculate the lifetime value of the lost customer.

1. Estimating the cost of recovery: It is also important to estimate the costs associated with the implementation and execution of the Disaster Recovery Plan. This may include the costs of backup infrastructure, recovery services, additional personnel, consulting and other necessary resources.
2. Assess indirect costs: In addition to direct costs, it is important to consider indirect costs that may arise from a disruption, such as damage to the company’s reputation, litigation, regulatory fines, and other intangible costs.
3. Perform scenario analysis: It is useful to perform scenario analyses to assess the potential impact in different disruption situations. This may include natural disasters, cyber-attacks, hardware failures, etc.
4. Document and maintain calculations: Record all calculations and cost estimates in an easy-to-understand format and update them periodically as circumstances change and improvements are made to your recovery plan.

Calculating the cost of disruptions is a crucial part of disaster recovery planning, as it helps justify investments in recovery strategies and make informed risk mitigation decisions. It is also important to remember that, ultimately, the goal is to minimize the impact of disruptions rather than simply calculating their cost.

AWS and BigCheese: IT Resiliency

AWS offers tools to build a scalable and cost-effective Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. We would like to develop a customized DR strategy for your company. This strategy leverages the multiple Availability Zones and Regions of the global AWS infrastructure.

Minimizing Recovery Time with AWS

One of the crucial aspects of a Disaster Recovery Plan in AWS is the ability to minimize recovery time. Rapid restoration of services and data is essential to ensure business continuity. AWS offers a number of features and practices that help achieve this goal:

1. Multi-Regional Replication: AWS enables replication of critical data and systems across multiple geographic locations. This means that, in the event of an incident, data and services can be recovered from an alternate region, significantly reducing downtime.
2. Automation: Recovery Plans on AWS can be configured to activate automatically in the event of a disaster or outage. Automation accelerates response and ensures rapid restoration.
3. Availability Zones: AWS offers multiple Availability Zones within a region. These zones are designed to be independent of each other, which adds an additional layer of resilience. If a zone is affected, services can automatically switch to a different zone.
4. Continuous Monitoring: AWS provides monitoring and alerting tools that allow companies to maintain constant control over the status of their services. This facilitates early detection of problems and proactive measures.
5. Recovery Testing: Regular recovery testing is essential to ensure that the plan is working as expected. AWS makes it easy to perform recovery testing without impacting production, allowing companies to fine-tune their recovery strategies and further reduce recovery time in the event of an actual incident.

An AWS Disaster Recovery Plan focuses on minimizing recovery time, which is critical to maintaining business continuity. The combination of replication, automation, availability zones, monitoring and recovery testing is a robust solution to protect your critical data and services in any adverse situation.

RTO and RPO are two critical concepts that determine an organization’s recovery strategy and objectives.

1. RTO (Recovery Time Objective): RTO in the context of AWS refers to the maximum time an organization is willing to tolerate for its critical systems, applications and data to recover and become fully operational again after an incident or disaster. This recovery time objective is measured in hours, minutes or seconds and is essential in determining how long an organization can afford to be without access to its essential services before it has an unacceptable impact on its operations and customers. In an AWS Disaster Recovery Plan, the procedures and infrastructure necessary to comply with the RTO are defined. AWS offers a number of tools and services, such as data replication, Availability Zones and Regions, that enable organizations to design effective strategies to meet their recovery time objectives.
2. RPO (Recovery Point Objective): RPO in the context of AWS refers to the acceptable level of data loss that an organization is willing to tolerate in the event of an incident or disaster. Indicates the point in time to which an organization wishes to be able to restore its data without significant loss. For example, if the RPO is 1 hour, it means that the organization is willing to lose up to 1 hour of data in case of an adverse event. AWS offers a variety of solutions and services, such as automatic backups, data replication and scalable storage, that enable organizations to define and meet their recovery point objectives. These services help ensure that, even in situations of disruption, data loss remains within the limits set by the RPO.

Determining the RTO and RPO in an AWS Disaster Recovery Plan is critical as it helps organizations set clear expectations for recovery time and tolerable data loss. These objectives influence decisions about infrastructure architecture, service configuration, and implementation of backup and recovery strategies on AWS.

Schedule a Meeting with BigCheese and AWS

At BigCheese we are a certified AWS partner, and we have a team of professionals ready to meet with you and start this analysis. If you are interested in protecting your brand reputation, strengthening your market position and driving business growth through IT resiliency, let’s schedule a 30-minute meeting with BigCheese.

At BigCheese, we are excited to help ensure the continuity of your business and the security of your data.