Introduction
Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is a critical component of any organization’s cloud strategy, even when leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) as your cloud provider. While AWS provides robust infrastructure and tools for building resilient systems, outages – sometimes catastrophic ones – still happen. There are four key pitfalls to avoid when crafting your AWS disaster recovery strategy and emphasize the importance of proper testing.
Pitfall 1: Banking on Availability Zones for Disaster Resilience
AWS provides availability zones (AZs) as a means of achieving high availability, allowing you to distribute resources across multiple data centers in a given AWS region. This capability ensures that traditional datacenter outages, like fires and floods, will not impact your systems’ availability.
However, AZs within a region share a lot of infrastructure such as regional services and the AWS control plane. Consequently, AZs alone do not provide comprehensive disaster resilience to the 70% of major cloud outages that impact an entire region.
Amazon builds each region of AWS to be architecturally independent, ensuring that no outage should ever cascade across regions. To ensure your AWS workloads can recover from any cloud outage, you need to take advantage of this global architecture. Replicating your data and your infrastructure to an alternate AWS region, and ensuring you can fail over to that alternate region when needed, gives you confidence you can endure any outage or disruption in the cloud.
Pitfall 2: Not Accounting for Cyber Disasters
While AWS practitioners often focus on infrastructure-related downtime such as outages, cyber disasters – such as ransomware attacks – are more prevalent and even more devastating. A disaster recovery strategy that solely focuses on geographic redundancy won’t help if you’ve been hacked. To ensure that your business is protected from any disaster in the cloud, it’s important to consider cyber recovery as an essential component of your DR plan.
Key principles to protect from cyber disasters:
- Use cross-account replication. By using a different account for your replicated environment your DR is safe even if your main AWS account gets hacked.
- Secure your assets. Make sure your backups are vaulted, immutable and air-gapped.
- Include forensics in your recovery plan. It’s always possible that ransomware was infected in production – and therefore the DR environment – months before you’re aware of it. It’s important to be able to detect ransomware and malware in your recovery environment.
Pitfall 3: Relying on Your CI/CD System for Recovery
Modern cloud operations depend heavily on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems for deploying software and infrastructure. It’s natural to assume that your CI/CD system will play a critical role in disaster recovery, in particular, “infrastructure as code” (IaC) tools such as TerraForm. However, CI/CD systems are not disaster-proof themselves. Many of them are hosted in the cloud, and their operations often rely on external dependencies like open source software packages downloaded from public repositories. A robust disaster recovery approach requires systems to be re-established without these dependencies that may be unavailable during a disaster. Further, IaC does not re-establish all necessary settings to bring up an environment, and doesn’t handle stateful assets such as data recovery at all.
A better approach is to create a disaster recovery environment that is entirely independent from the software development and delivery mechanisms.
Pitfall 4: Table-Top Testing (or Not Testing at All)
Testing disaster recovery procedures is a vital but often overlooked or underinvested aspect of DR planning. In fact, Gartner reports that 63% of organizations don’t trust their disaster recovery plan. Some organizations rely on mock tests or, worse, neglect testing altogether. However, authentic disaster recovery drills are crucial for identifying and addressing the specific details that could make or break your recovery process. Testing answers questions like: Do we know which DNS entries need to be updated? Have we identified critical IP addresses buried in our configurations? Do we have backup strategies for secrets and credentials? Authentic testing ensures confidence in your ability to recover when needed.
It’s easy to see why testing is often overlooked. Authentic testing takes time away from strategic projects, can impact production, and oftentimes requires nights and weekends. But without a verified test, you don’t know if our DR will work when you need it.
Arpio: Simplifying Disaster Recovery
Avoiding these common pitfalls and achieving a robust disaster recovery strategy can be challenging. That’s where Arpio comes in. Arpio provides a comprehensive disaster recovery solution that helps you overcome these challenges. With Arpio, you get:
- Cross-Region Disaster Recovery – Easily replicate and recover your workloads in alternate AWS regions, ensuring true resilience against cloud disasters.
- Cyber Resilience – Arpio offers features like immutable/air-gapped backups, recovery forensics, and system quarantine to protect against cyber disasters.
- Dependency-Free Recovery – Arpio allows for the re-establishment of systems without relying on external dependencies, ensuring readiness even in the face of cloud service interruptions.
- Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Testing – Arpio facilitates authentic disaster recovery drills, enabling you to identify and address critical recovery details and build confidence in your DR readiness.
In conclusion, crafting a robust AWS disaster recovery strategy is essential for maintaining business continuity in the cloud. By avoiding these common pitfalls – either on your own or leveraging solutions like Arpio – you can safeguard your organization against unexpected disasters and ensure that your systems will recover when you need them most.
For more information about how Arpio can help you avoid these common mistakes and ensure your disaster recovery strategy is reliable and effective, connect with an Arpio expert.
