Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Backup and disaster recovery strategies for increased resilience (ARC208)

Summary

The session focused on identifying resilience requirements for data protection, disaster recovery, and backup.
Recovery objectives, RPO (Recovery Point Objective), and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) were discussed as critical metrics for resilience.
Deployment patterns were examined, including on-premises, multi-cloud, and AWS-specific strategies.
Backup policies, retention periods, and frequency were considered, along with compliance and legal requirements.
The speaker highlighted the importance of account topology and immutability of snapshots for ransomware mitigation.
The old vs. new paradigms of disaster recovery were contrasted, emphasizing the cost-effectiveness and elasticity of cloud-based solutions.
Elastic Disaster Recovery (EDR) was introduced, offering a mix of aggressive RPOs and RTOs at a lower cost.
The session covered the benefits of EDR, including fast recovery, easy testing, low cost, ransomware recovery, and data protection.
The lifecycle of EDR was explained, from agent installation to ongoing replication and failover/failback processes.
Backup and restore strategies were discussed for less critical applications, with a focus on cost optimization and longer retention periods.
The speaker addressed ransomware recovery, emphasizing the importance of detection, isolation, and immutable backups.
The session concluded with encouragement to define organizational requirements and explore AWS services for backup and disaster recovery.

RPO and RTO are not one-size-fits-all and vary by business, system, application, and even resource, necessitating a tailored approach to disaster recovery.
AWS's cloud-based disaster recovery solutions offer elasticity, allowing for minimal resource provisioning during normal operations and full provisioning only during recovery or DR drills.
Elastic Disaster Recovery challenges traditional paradigms by providing aggressive recovery objectives at a lower cost, leveraging continuous block-level replication and dynamic resource allocation.
Testing disaster recovery solutions is crucial, and AWS's non-disruptive DR drills and application-level verifications ensure reliability and readiness for actual recovery scenarios.
Backup and restore strategies are essential for less critical applications, where longer RPOs are acceptable, and they can be complemented by disaster recovery strategies for more critical workloads.
Ransomware recovery requires a multi-faceted approach, including fast detection, immutable backups in isolated accounts, and the ability to recover quickly to minimize data loss and downtime.
AWS Backup and Elastic Disaster Recovery are recommended services to explore for organizations looking to improve their backup and disaster recovery strategies.