Disaster recovery (DR) is important for all businesses. It relates to preparing for and being capable of recovering from a disaster. This might include a power outage, software failure, or human error. It might also be something like a fire, flooding, or earthquake. DR works to minimize the problems after a disaster and can include training employees, planning, documenting processes, and more.
Those with physical environments need to have a duplicate of their infrastructure in order to ensure available resources in a disaster. This is often a secondary data center that is found, installed, and maintained to support the needed capacity if things go wrong.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) management services allows you to scale your infrastructure as needed and can save you money. You get reliable and quick infrastructure with the flexibility to optimize and change resources during a DR event. There are many services that AWS offers to help with DR and we’ll go over those now.
Storage Services
AWS has many different options for storage, which is excellent for choosing what matters most to your company. Amazon Simple Storage Service offers a durable primary data storage option that is stored on various devices across facilities. It also have protection for archiving and data retention, multi-factor authentication, AWS Identity and Access Management and bucket policies.
Other services to consider are Amazon Glacier, Amazon Elastic Block Store, AWS Import/Export, and AWS Storage Gateway. Each does something a little different, but all relate to storing data and connecting the cloud with on-site IT.
Computation Services
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud offers a resizable amount of computing capacity on the cloud. With DR, this means you can create virtual machines, of which you have total control, in a quick manner. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) comes with this and it allows you to identify and configure AMIs to launch during recovery effort. Availability Zones are also involved, these are locations engineered to avoid failures in other zones. These offer low-latency connectivity to zones in the same region.
In addition, the Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector lets you import virtual machine images from your current environment to Amazon EC2.
Networking Services
It’s not uncommon that you will need to modify network settings in a disaster setting. AWS has many services and features that let you modify and manage these settings in a straightforward way.
The four main services that relate to this are Amazon Direct Connect, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53.
Route 53 gives businesses an affordable way to route users to Internet applications and include load-balancing options. Elastic Load Balancing helps to distribute the incoming traffic across various EC2 instances for a higher fault tolerance. The VPC allows you to a provision and use a section of the cloud to launch resources in a virtual network. Finally, Direct Connect lets you set up a network connection right from your business to AWS.
Database Services
For database needs in a DR situation, AWS offers Amazon Relational Database Service, which allows you to operate and scale a relational database on the cloud. There is also Amazon DynamoDB which is a NoSQL service that lets you store or retrieve data and serve any level of request traffic. In addition, Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse service that helps to analyze your data with existing tools.
Deployment Services
AWS has deployment automation and software installation and configuration tools that can be a real boon for DR. This helps with recovery and can make a disaster a lot less stressful. The services to look at here include AWS CloudFormation, AWS ElasticBeanstalk and AWS OpsWOrds. These all work to help you build template of resources and deploy them quickly and easily.