Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

In the realm of modern business, the Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis 2021 report revealed that approximately 40% of service interruptions incur costs ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, while 17% surpass the million-dollar mark. To mitigate these risks, it is essential to establish a robust data protection and disaster recovery (DR) strategy. As more companies embrace public cloud solutions, many are adopting a hybrid model, with critical workloads distributed across both on-premises data centers and cloud environments.

This article delves into how Druva, a provider of SaaS-based data protection solutions, can assist in crafting a disaster recovery strategy for workloads hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will detail the process of safeguarding AWS workloads within a single AWS account and enabling failover to another AWS account or region, thereby minimizing potential disruptions to your business.

Architecture Overview

The architecture outlined here illustrates how to safeguard your AWS workloads against outages and disasters. With Druva’s user-friendly interface, you can swiftly establish a disaster recovery plan, ensuring your AWS infrastructure is protected within minutes.

Druva’s cloud DR framework, built on AWS, leverages native services to create a secure environment for comprehensive backup and disaster recovery operations. With Druva, you can:

Effortlessly create cross-account disaster recovery sites by cloning Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their dependencies.
Establish backup policies to automate the creation and transfer of snapshots for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances to DR regions, in alignment with your recovery point objective (RPO) requirements.
Develop service level objective (SLO) based DR plans, which include scheduling automated tests to ensure compliance.
Easily monitor the implementation of DR plans through the Druva console.
Generate compliance reports for DR failover and test activation.

Additional features include automated runbook initiation, selection of target AWS instance types for disaster recovery, and streamlined orchestration and testing, which enhance the protection and recovery of data at scale. Druva offers flexibility in adapting to evolving infrastructures across various locations, complying with regulatory standards (like GDPR and CCPA), and ensuring rapid recovery of workloads after disasters, thereby meeting your business-critical recovery time objectives (RTOs). This unified solution allows for snapshot frequency as short as every five minutes, greatly improving your RPOs. Being a SaaS solution, Druva reduces costs by eliminating the need for traditional storage hardware management, software upgrades, and patches.

We will guide you through setting up Druva to automate disaster recovery for your AWS workloads.

Step 1: Log into the Druva Platform and Grant AWS Access

After signing into the Druva Cloud Platform, you must provide third-party access to your AWS account by clicking the “Add New Account” button and following the prompts outlined in the accompanying visuals.

Druva utilizes AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to manage your AWS workloads. To facilitate this process, Druva supplies an AWS CloudFormation template that generates:

An IAM role
An IAM instance profile
An IAM policy

The resulting Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the IAM role is linked to Druva, enabling it to conduct backup and DR operations for your AWS workloads. Druva adheres strictly to security protocols and best practices recommended by AWS, ensuring all access permissions to your AWS resources and regions are governed by IAM.

Once you have logged into Druva and set up your account, you can proceed to configure disaster recovery for your AWS workloads through the following steps.

Step 2: Identify the Source Environment

A source environment refers to a logical grouping of Amazon VPCs, subnets, security groups, and other necessary infrastructure components for your applications.

Create your source environment by selecting the AWS resources you wish to configure for failover. Currently, Druva supports Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS as resources that can be protected. With Druva’s automated disaster recovery, these resources can be failed over to a secondary site at the touch of a button.

It’s important to note that creating a source environment does not alter existing resources or configurations in your AWS account; it merely saves this configuration information within Druva’s service.

Step 3: Clone the Environment

The next step involves cloning the source environment to a designated region for failover in the event of a disaster. Druva allows for cloning to another region or AWS account, facilitating rapid and seamless resource failover.

Step 4: Establish a Backup Policy

You can either create a new backup policy or utilize an existing one to initiate backups in the cloned or target region. This enables Druva to effectively restore instances using the backup copies.

Step 5: Formulate the DR Plan

A disaster recovery plan is a systematic set of instructions designed to recover resources following a failure or disaster. The goal is to restore your production environment with minimal downtime. To create your DR plan, follow these steps:

Click the “Create Disaster Recovery Plan” button to access the DR plan creation page.
Input the name of your DR plan, along with your RPO and RTO parameters.

For instance, if you set your RPO as 24 hours and your backup is scheduled daily at 8:00 PM, a disaster occurring at 7:59 PM means you can recover data from the previous day’s backup (24 hours of potential data loss). Similarly, if your RTO is set at 30 hours, all critical IT services should be recoverable within that timeframe from the moment the disaster occurs.

Create your plan based on the source environment, target environment, and relevant resources.

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