A minor interruption of service could prove to be a disaster for an organization, resulting in huge amounts of data loss. Anything can trigger a disaster – a security attack, a natural disaster, or human error. With business continuity being the top priority for any company in the cloud, a robust disaster recovery plan will help organizations prepare themselves in the event of a failure or security breach.

Aspire’s leading cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers a multitude of features for the users to build their own disaster recovery solution. In this blog, we delve into what constitutes a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for AWS and 10 tips to leverage the features in your AWS console to prevent or revive from a security disaster.

What Constitutes an AWS Disaster Recovery Solution?

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a structured manual with a detailed set of instructions that will help recover system and networks in case of a security breach or failure, with a notion to revive the business operations as quickly as possible.

If you are thinking about deploying an on-premise disaster recovery solution, you might have to spend a fortune on implementation and maintenance. This is why many organizations leverage the disaster recovery tools and solutions provided by their cloud vendors such as AWS and Azure. Aspire is partnered with these CSPs to offer disaster recovery solutions tailored to AWS and Azure.

AWS customers can enjoy the following benefits from developing a robust disaster recovery plan:

  • Minimize data loss – secures critical data by establishing replication intervals
  • Quickly restores critical applications – minimal downtime
  • Distributes risk by leveraging AWS cross-region disaster recovery
  • Quick revival – requires minimal time to restore operations by quickly retrieving files and data

10 Tips to Develop an AWS Disaster Recovery Plan

AWS Disaster Recovery Plan Tips

1. Identify critical resources and assets

What resources form the fulcrum of your business? A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) will give you a fair idea on which areas are more vulnerable to security threats and preview the potential impact of a disaster.

2. Define your recovery time objective (RTO) and your recovery point objective (RPO)

Calculate the window of downtime your organization can afford before suffering monetary losses. Henceforth, calculating your recovery time objective is critical for a robust disaster recovery plan. Calculating the recovery point objective (RPO) involves how much data loss your organization can afford before incurring significant damage. For instance, if losing 5 hours of data is considered a significant damage, you need to set an RPO of much less than 5 hours.

3. Choose a disaster recovery planning method

There are 4 main recovery methods to choose from:

  • Backup and restore – a managed solution can be used to backup and restore data on a need-to-do basis. However, the restoration process could consume a significant amount of time as the system doesn’t keep data on standby.
  • Pilot light – the core applications and data must be kept running to enable quick retrieval in the event of a disaster.
  • Warm standby – you can duplicate the system’s core elements and keep them running on standby at all times.
  • Hot standby – a replica of all the data and applications can be made and deployed in 2 or more locations.

4. Define and implement security and corrective measures

You can deploy server and network monitoring software as remediation tools can quickly restore a system after an attack.

5. Test your plan before implementing it

Running schedule testing while you develop your DRP will help you detect errors before implementing the plan.

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6. Schedule maintenance

Update your plans on a regular basis to comply with the system changes. These will, in turn, be lessons learned in the aftermath of an attack.

7. Create backup for your data

Scheduling regular backups of data stored in Amazon EC2 and EBS volumes could be insufficient. A quick access to data during a disaster requires an in-depth AWS disaster recovery plan to recover and restore the backup data from cloud with minimal downtime.

8. Use cross-region backups

While chalking out a plan, you need to decide where the critical data must be stored. In order to avoid your entire system getting knocked offline, you should distribute the data across different availability zones (AZ) around the world.

Leveraging the cross-region replication option will automate the copying of data to a designated bucket in another region.

9. Use multi-factor authentication

Keeping your root passwords and credentials secure and hidden from non-authorized users is paramount. Setting a MFA solution will ensure the administrative privileges don’t fall in the hands of attackers.

10. Consider a third-party Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

Although it’s efficient to implement the entire disaster recovery plan in-house, smaller organizations lacking a dedicated IT team can find it easier to use a third-party solution. DRaaS companies will help them develop, implement, and maintain their DRPs, enabling them to focus on enhancing their business.

Developing and implementing a disaster recovery plan for AWS requires a certain degree of innovativeness, since AWS does not offer its own DR solution.

Our experts at Aspire can help you build a customized DR solution tailor-made for your requirements.

 

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Top 5 AWS Monitoring and Optimization Tools

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