Backup and disaster recovery strategies for increased resilience (COP319)

Key Takeaways

Shared Responsibility Model

• AWS is responsible for the cloud infrastructure, regions, and availability zones.
• Customers are responsible for the data, architecture, networking, and compliance within their AWS environment.
• It's crucial to test the data and ensure compliance, as it is often overlooked.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

• RPO is the amount of data you can afford to lose, and RTO is the time it takes to recover.
• There's a trade-off between the complexity and cost of the solution and the RPO/RTO.
• Backup has higher RPO and RTO, disaster recovery has lower RPO and RTO, and high availability is the most complex and expensive but has the lowest RPO and RTO.

Tiering Applications

• Tier your applications based on their business requirements and RPO/RTO needs.
• Most of your environment should be in the lower tiers (3 and 4), with 30% or so in the top tiers (1 and 2).

AWS Disaster Recovery Service (DRS)

• DRS uses an agent to continuously replicate data to another AWS region or availability zone.
• It automates the recovery process, creating the necessary resources in the target environment.
• DRS offers benefits like faster recovery, lower cost, easy testing, and ransomware recovery.

AWS Backup

• AWS Backup is a centralized, fully managed backup service that can protect various AWS resources.
• It can be used in conjunction with DRS to provide a layered approach, with DRS for near-real-time protection and Backup for lower-cost, long-term backups.
• Backup Vaults can be used to create an isolated, encrypted copy of your data for increased cyber resilience.

Best Practices

1. Tier your applications based on business requirements.
2. Test your recovery capabilities regularly, at least once a year.
3. Leave time for troubleshooting during recovery tests and processes.
4. Use a combination of backup and disaster recovery solutions, depending on the specific threat or incident.