Disaster, be it a tornado or a human error, can be destructive. Many companies have gone out of business after losing their mission critical data due to disasters hitting their data centers. Hence, in this digital world, having a disaster recovery plan in place is pivotal to any organization’s success. The best you can do is be prepared for any disaster.

While most enterprises are getting ready and recuperating from any negative impact or disaster possibilities, there are customers who are on cloud but are unaware of the best approaches towards strategizing their disaster recovery plans effectively. No worries!

Here are the Do’s and Don’ts that you must keep in mind while planning your next DR Strategy on AWS Cloud.

Disaster recovery plan – The Do’s

Back up your data into AWS with the right tool/technique

Before a disaster hits one of the AWS regions and you lose all of your critical data, make sure you have backed up your data to multiple other regions. The frequency of backing up of your data would largely depend on the Recovery Time Objectives (i.e., how quickly you want the data asset to be recovered) and your preferred Recovery Point Objectives (i.e, how fresh the recovery of the asset must be, like, zero data loss, 15 mins out of date, etc).

If your DR strategy is automated to take up routine file backups, the recovery point would be the time when the latest backup was uploaded to cloud storage. Similarly, if you are taking up redundant backups of data between databases, the recovery point would automatically be the last operation done on the standby database.

Audit your Cloud Infra

In simple words, disaster in any form is a disaster. Human error, innovation failure, DR planning can go haywire at any point of time. With well-planned DR strategies in place, businesses can become DR-ready to handle any emergency. Botmetric recommends you to run routine DR/Backup audit to make sure all your mission-critical data on AWS Cloud is safe and secure.

Backup Everything

Don’t just focus on data! Take a backup of all your IT infrastructure modules, essential application settings, etc. it is highly recommended to periodically copy your data backups across the AWS regions.

With Botmetric, you can do so by scheduling a job for cross-region copy:

Copy EBS Volume snapshot (based on volume tags) across regions Copy RDS snapshot (based on RDS tags) across regions

Test Your DR Plan

Automate your DR plan so that your business is disaster-proof. Identify the crucial areas that you feel might get affected if a disaster hits, and try and automate the tests for that particular area. Periodic testing will ensure that all policies, including RTO and RPO, are aligned properly. Botmetric DR audit runs an extensive list of audits for your AWS Cloud Infra and in turn automates the DR/Backup tests. This ensures you stay up-to-date with the health of your cloud infrastructure.

Disaster recovery plan – The Don’ts

Stop Procrastinating

Disaster will not knock at the door before it strikes. Therefore, don’t let disaster recovery planning take a back seat. Having a DR strategy in place and testing your AWS architecture will make sure all your data stick through you even when disaster strikes.

Don’t Just Plan For the Sake Of Planning

For business continuity, most of the enterprises are having a DR plan. But, simply having a plan without a strategic approach can put your business at risk. An ideal approach would be to keep all security measures in place and audit your cloud infra regularly. Botmetric DR/Backup audit ensures data safety by enforcing data retention and backup policies, across geographically distributed cloud resources.

Avoid Single-Region Replication

In order to survive the worst cloud outage, it is highly recommended that you copy your data across regions. It means if data loss occurs at one region, you can access your lost data from the second backup region. This is perhaps the best strategy to survive from extreme cloud outages, even if failure occurs in an entire AWS region.

These are some of the practical do’s and don’ts that you should practice to back up data in the cloud with ease. With timely automation of DR backup tasks and the right strategy in place, you can safely make your AWS Cloud Infrastructure DR ready. Botmetric can help.

So what are you waiting for? Sign Up for Botmetric 14-day trial and make your business on AWS Cloud ‘disaster-proof’.

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