Understanding AREMIS Disaster Recovery Options in AWS
- Maxime VANHAMME
Ensuring Business Continuity in Times of Crisis
In today's digital landscape, ensuring the continuity of business operations is paramount. Disruptions caused by natural disasters, cyberattacks, or infrastructure failures can have severe consequences. To mitigate these risks, organizations are turning to cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provide a range of disaster recovery options.
When selecting a DR strategy, the client must weigh the benefits of lower RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) vs the costs of implementing and operating a strategy.
What are RTO & RPO?
The Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective will define the backup and recovery method to put in place. As those times are strongly influencing the setup and running cost, this exercise is executed together with the client during the RFP phase.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable delay between the interruption of service and restoration of service. This determines an acceptable length of time for service downtime.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of time since the last data recovery point. This determines what is considered an acceptable loss of data.
For RTO and RPO, lower numbers represent less downtime and data loss. However, lower RTO and RPO cost more in terms of spend on resources and operational complexity. Therefore, customers must choose RTO and RPO objectives that provide appropriate value for their workload.
AREMIS Disaster Recovery (DR) Architectures on AWS
AREMIS offers the following 4 options to address different customer expectations:
Basic Back-up and Recovery
The Basic Back-up and Recovery method serves as the foundation for any disaster recovery strategy. It involves taking regular backups of critical data and infrastructure configurations. These backups are stored securely in AWS, ensuring data durability and reliability. In the event of a disaster, AREMIS can restore the client environments using these backups. While this method provides a baseline level of protection, recovery time can be longer, depending on the size and complexity of the infrastructure.
Pilot Light
The Pilot Light approach takes disaster recovery a step further by pre-configuring a minimal version of the production environment. It involves running critical services and applications in a dormant state, ready to be activated when a disaster strikes. By replicating essential components of the production environment, such as databases, security groups, and virtual private clouds (VPCs), the organization can quickly scale up and restore full functionality. This method offers reduced recovery time compared to Basic Back-up and Recovery, making it suitable for businesses with higher availability requirements.
Warm Standby
The Warm Standby method builds upon the Pilot Light approach by maintaining a partially active replica of the production environment. In this setup, a proportion of the infrastructure is continuously running and processing a limited amount of live traffic. This ensures a faster recovery time compared to Pilot Light, as a significant portion of the infrastructure is already operational. By monitoring key metrics and applying automated scaling, the organization can seamlessly transition to the standby environment during a disaster. Warm Standby is well-suited for businesses that cannot afford significant downtime and require quick recovery.
Hot Standby (Multi-Site)
The Hot Standby approach represents the most robust disaster recovery option, designed to provide near-instantaneous failover in the event of a disaster. It involves maintaining a fully synchronized and active replica of the production environment across multiple AWS regions. The standby environment receives live traffic alongside the primary environment, ensuring real-time data replication and continuous availability. Should a disaster occur, failover mechanisms redirect traffic to the standby environment without any noticeable impact on operations. This method is ideal for mission-critical applications with stringent recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
Disaster recovery is an essential aspect of any business continuity strategy. AREMIS offers a range of options to suit different customer requirements, from Basic Back-up and Recovery to Hot Standby (Multi-Site). Each method provides varying levels of recovery time and infrastructure readiness, allowing organizations to tailor their disaster recovery approach based on their unique needs. By leveraging the power of the cloud, businesses can ensure the availability, reliability, and resilience of their critical systems, safeguarding their operations and maintaining customer trust even in the face of unexpected events.