“What is best practice disaster recovery in AWS, and how do we compare?”
Almost all of our customer conversations start with this question. They want to understand how the approaches they use today or are planning will improve their resiliency stance, what gaps remain, and therefore how much risk they’re exposed to.
To aid these conversations, we wanted to document the stages towards best-practice DR in AWS and allow any infrastructure team to assess their current state. From “bare” to “superstar,” you’ll know where you fall and opportunities to improve.
Using our DR Maturity Matrix for AWS, you can evaluate your infrastructure resilience across the five key components of your DR plan:
- Recovery Times – These are the recovery times you can actually achieve in various scenarios (outages, cyber attacks, etc.). Of course all else being equal, shorter is better — under an hour is best in class — but not all applications will require that speed. Ultimately, it’s important that your recovery times meet or exceed the RTO you’ve declared internally and to external parties including customers and regulators.
- Planning – Best practice includes a defined, documented and shared recovery plan and process with clear ownership in various scenarios and stages.
- Validation and Testing – A plan is great, but not if it hasn’t been tested. Regular validation and testing is crucial to ensure the steps are correct and the responsible people and tools are prepared to act.
- Measurement – You’ve set RTOs and RPOs, but can you actually measure them? And how often do you measure them? To ensure a great recovery, it’s important to do both.
- Monitoring – For a fully and quickly resilient environment, monitoring of your production as well as DR environment is key. This means having both observability as well as real-time notifications sent through an IT triage process.
You can download the assessment here: Arpio DR Maturity Matrix.
After you’ve completed the assessment, if you’re interested in learning how Arpio can help improve your DR stance, please get in touch.
