Did you know that in the past 12 months, 70% of organizations have seen an increase in outages from cloud architecture? Managing disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud adds even greater complexity to that of traditional IT DR.
This article overviews the importance of disaster recovery for cloud-hosted enterprise applications, recovery services from AWS, DR plan best practices, and cloud disaster recovery software.
Disaster recovery in cloud-hosted applications: An overview
What is disaster recovery in cloud computing? Disaster recovery for cloud-hosted applications encompasses the strategy and plan to restore and recover applications, resources and data in the cloud. Similar to on-premises or traditional IT disaster recovery, cloud DR is critical to ensure your company’s cloud-hosted business services are protected, available and resilient in the event of a regional outage or cloud service disruption.
Cloud disaster recovery challenges
Disaster recovery in the cloud adds complexity to the already complicated recovery process. Cloud applications are often a combination of various disconnected application workloads located across regions or availability zones (AZs). In addition to IT disaster recovery challenges, you need to consider these additional complexities for cloud-native applications:
- Application interdependencies can cause bottlenecks during recovery or result in non-functional applications if not recovered in the proper order.
- Data synchronization between the primary and secondary or cloud DR site can be costly and difficult to manage due to latency, data volumes, and scalability, amongst other reasons.
- Downtime minimization is challenging and requires comprehensive planning, regular testing and automated response options.
- Cost management is a necessity while operating applications in the cloud but it can be expensive to ensure resilience in cloud management.
- People with tailored IT skill sets are hard to find and expensive but essential; the right talent understands your cloud architecture and has intricate knowledge of managing disaster recovery for cloud-hosted applications.
AWS cloud integration for disaster recovery
Cloud providers, like AWS, can help you simplify and accelerate your cloud disaster recovery process. AWS offers various services that automate manual DR tasks and reduce their complexity. AWS categorizes its disaster recovery services by DR strategy: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active. These strategies range in cost, complexity and coverage.
Which DR strategy you employ with AWS determines the services available to you. Typically AWS cloud integration services are categorized into the following groups: data backup, data replication, traffic routing, infrastructure deployment and scaling.
During a live cloud disaster recovery in AWS, you fail over from your primary cloud instance, like an AWS EC2 virtual server, to a secondary site in a different availability or region. Here are a few examples of important AWS services to integrate into your tech recovery stack:
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS)
AWS DRS allows you to initiate secure data replication with affordable storage, minimal compute and point-in-time recovery.
AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS)
Run controlled experiments to improve resilience and performance with AWS FIS.
AWS Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC)
AWS ARC ensures business continuity by maintaining application availability even during regional outages. Use it to simplify traffic management during failover scenarios and streamline recovery processes.
AWS Lambda
With AWS Lambda you can automate specific tasks triggered by a DR event to auto-replicate the application in the failover region AZ or back to its primary site.
AWS Resilience Hub
Use AWS Resilience Hub to define your resilience goals, assess your resilience posture against these goals and implement recommendations for improvement based on AWS’ framework.
Disaster recovery plan best practices in an AWS environment
We’ve already shared cloud disaster recovery best practices, however, it’s important to consider nuances with your cloud provider. For example, AWS provides prescriptive guidance to help businesses define DR strategies, choose the right database type to meet RTO/RPO requirements, and more. When planning disaster recovery for AWS workloads it’s also important to consider the following:
Evaluate AWS applications
Ensure that you have evaluated and categorized all AWS applications by criticality tiers: mission critical, business critical, business operation and administrative. This allows you to more effectively create DR plans for each tier of applications.
Assess resilience in AWS infrastructure
Using AWS Resilience Hub, as mentioned above, you can evaluate recovery targets such as RTO and RPO. This service will analyze the components of an application and uncover any weaknesses like incomplete infrastructure setup, misconfigurations, and more.
Build automation for AWS region failovers
AWS DRS, also mentioned above, can automate cross-region or cross-AZ failover and failback processes saving you time and reducing manual errors.
Communicate the DR strategy
It’s important that all key stakeholders, including cloud operations, application owners, IT teams, business managers and executives understand the DR strategy and potential downtime should an outage occur.
Example of a cloud-hosted disaster recovery plan
Here is an example of a cloud-hosted disaster recovery plan in an automated, executable runbook. This runbook takes a comprehensive step-by-step cloud disaster recovery plan including all tasks and dependencies and puts them in chronological order. Each task is grouped by workstreams, assigned to an individual or team, and given an allocated timeframe for completion.
In the Cutover automated runbook example below, the workstreams are failover prep, failover execution, validation and failback. You can filter the runbook to quickly understand the status of completed, stalled, or not started tasks in a certain grouping of tasks by workstream, user, task level, etc.
Cutover’s integration capabilities enable you to automate:
- Communications via Slack, Microsoft Teams or other communication platforms
- Provisioning of infrastructure and applications as part of the recovery strategy
- Recovering Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in a different AWS region
- Notifications of the health of applications
- Creating change requests in ITSM platforms
Automated runbooks provide the visibility and orchestration needed to execute large-scale, complex cloud-hosted disaster recoveries.
AWS cloud disaster recovery with Cutover
Cutover and AWS work together to help enterprises streamline complex cloud disaster recoveries to increase efficiency and reduce financial and regulatory risks.
Shown in the example above, Cutover’s SaaS platform enables enterprises to standardize and automate disaster recovery for cloud-hosted applications with dynamic, automated runbooks. Learn more about Cutover’s IT disaster recovery solution or let us help you get started on your journey to a simpler cloud DR process by scheduling a demo today.