For any digital business, irrespective of its size, offering 24×7 365 days service is pivotal for business continuity. Even though disasters like natural calamities are a constant threat to them, businesses need to keep hitting on all the cylinders of their engines, be it rain or shine. Are you Disaster Recovery-ready? The public cloud service, AWS, of course, makes you DR-ready and offers an intense DR management too. However, gaps still remain as there are few AWS disaster recovery management challenges that need to be taken care of to leverage AWS as a disaster recovery system completely. Especially, if you or your organization are gliding through the storms of cost-cutting and quick management.
Challenges in the AWS Cloud DR Management
Even with an all-encompassing Disaster Recovery System integrated into AWS, businesses have to ensure that the software systems not only maintain data consistency across the systems but also look into other dynamics to it, such as the type of recovery procedures, type of security for the backup, cost management for the additional resources used for data backup, etc.
Here are some of the basic AWS Cloud DR Management challenges for beginners.
1) Automated Backup Scripts
Backup is a periodical operation that takes place in the background while normal business operations continue. Manual invocation and orchestration are not scalable for cloud applications because the process is very error-prone. Hence the backup process must be automated. Further, custom Automated Backup Procedure is quite tedious to achieve as it involves scripting, allocating, and provisioning distributed cloud resources. Businesses need to find a way to tackle the custom Automated Backup Procedure in a smart way.
2) Continuous Operations Monitoring
Managing the production backup system is an important consideration for a DR System. The DR System must monitor the backup operation, collect and collate logs from the production systems. The DR System should analyze the logs collected and alert the DevOps for any anomalies and errors so that the DevOps can make the remedial actions immediately. However, this is easier said than done.
3) Management of various permissions and authorization policies
The security concerns applicable to the production systems apply to the backup resources as well. As these backup systems might span across multiple regions, it introduces additional complexity due to the need for management of various permissions and authorization policies across all of the additional resources. The administration console for the DR system should provide tools that assign the rights to invoke backup, access business data, and recovery implementation across different zones, regions, and accounts.
4) Cost Management
In addition to the data consistency and all other challenges listed above, the DR solution should also take advantage of the elastic capabilities of the AWS and dynamically allocate or de-allocate the storage and processing resources to ensure that cost management is feasible.
5) Ease of Management
One of the top challenges of Backup-as-a-Service and Disaster Recovery as a Service management many businesses fail to win is the highly distributed nature of these services. The administration console has to abstract away the complexity of having to use the manual cloud copying operations, designing and organizing the network elements for the distributed data replication. Providing an easy interface for the DevOps to quickly to initiate the day to day scheduled tasks is a challenging proposition for custom ad-hoc solutions as without effective tools for DevOps are risky, costly and do not scale well.
To Conclude
The AWS cloud definitely supports many well-accepted DR structural designs and makes your infrastructure DR-ready by eliminating the Single Points of Failures on AWS Cloud. But despite tight security check-ins outage happens. The best way forward: having a Disaster Recovery Plan.
What are the challenges you are facing with AWS DR management and what DR plan do you follow? Share it on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
