“Failure”, it’s a word that often makes people uncomfortable but when it comes to failure in the world of IT, it can mean disastrous and costly consequences often coming at the worst possible time.
It’s safe to say that a smart IT Strategy is to prepare for failure.
The good news is that the ability to prepare for disaster has never been easier because of the cloud. The cloud is also more resilient than your average on-premise data center however even the most resilient measures are not foolproof.
Some common disasters that occur include outages, ransomware attacks, DDoS, windows corruption, and database crashes.
To avoid disaster it’s best to apply a little R&R (resilience and redundancy) into your applications.
AWS can easily provide multiple regions to host your IT environments and within each region allow for separate data centers. The premise is that if one availability zone has an outage your resources can continue to run on another zone.
You’re probably thinking “what if there were a regional outage?” In short, it’s unlikely to happen. If it does however, you could start to look at regional replication designing your applications to be accessible in a different region in the event that an outage does occur.
The following is a list of tools and features available to protect your environment from AWS Cloud Disaster.
AWS Backup
This service is the centralized place to configure backups for:
- EBS volumes
- RDS instances
- DynamoDB tables
- EFS file systems
- Storage Gateway
AWS Backup manages backup, retention periods plus provides cross-region replication. This means you can push your backups to a different region for easy recovery in the event of a regional outage.
CloudEndure Disaster Recovery
This new service allows you to replicate the contents of your on-premises, cloud-based or virtual systems to a low-cost staging area in the AWS region of your choice within your AWS account.
From the perspective of AWS, you can setup cross-region disaster recovery to create duplicate environments as they are needed. What makes this feature even more attractive is its low price tag of approximately $20/month per replicated server.
RDS Cross-region Replication
The Amazon RDS is a core database service of AWS. The multi-AZ feature provides resilience within a region.
It also has the ability to launch read replicas from either the same region or a different region using cross-region replication.
What does that mean? It means you can have replicas on standby in your disaster recovery – this can be standalone or become primary if an outage occurs.
S3 Replication
With Amazon storage service, your Amazon S3 can bucket between different AWS regions or alternatively, within the same. Replicated data can be owned by the same AWS account or different accounts.
Other options for disaster recovery include storage for copies of your backups in a backup AWS account.
It is possible to store only your source EC2 and RDS backups in a backup account without running expensive, underutilized resources but it is a manual process.
For more information about AWS backup service and pricing including; AWS CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, RDS cross-region replication, and S3 cross-region replication you can contact us at tammy.chapman@axtcorp.com.