Effective Backup and Disaster Recovery in AWS

February 29, 2016 / Anoop Prasad

According to a study by Amazon Web Services, more than three-quarters (82%) of organizations have plans to leverage cloud-based services to some extent in the immediate future. Clearly, the cost, agility, and flexibility advantages are too apparent to ignore, particularly for tasks such as disaster recovery (DR).

DR is essential because every organization is exposed to a range of outages and failures. Computer viruses are commonplace; applications and disk drives are susceptible to failures; data can become corrupted, and there is a high likelihood of human error as a threat. Other “real” disasters like floods, fires, power failures, or weather-related issues can’t be negated. Irrespective of the catastrophe being due to technical failure or natural phenomena, this unintended downtime must be quickly addressed by IT organizations to help restore the business to an operational state.

The lack of a DR strategy and plan carries a massive risk. Business downtime can mean big losses in productivity. Such failures can cause irreparable damage to reputations and/or financial losses.

Safeguarding Data with AWS

Protecting data in the cloud is of utmost importance not only to protect information but also to gain customer trust. AWS provides a global, flexible IT infrastructure known for scalability, reliability, and security. When data is copied to the AWS cloud, it is stored in one of the eight global AWS Regions. AWS never relocates customer data beyond the user-defined Region to meet customers’ regulatory and/or legal compliance needs.

AWS provides some of the most advanced security features in the industry. AWS services are designed for an environment with extensive and validated security and controls, including Service Organization Controls 1 (SOC 1), ISO 270001 Certification, and PCI DSS12 Level 1 compliance among others. Some of the services include:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Amazon S3 is used as a cloud storage box for backup data and images. Companies can read, write, and delete almost an unlimited number of objects containing from one byte to 5 TB of data each. Amazon S3 is no different from a traditional on-premise SAN or NAS tool, but, as an AWS cloud implementation, it is far more nimble and flexible, and geographically redundant. Amazon S3 is built to offer 99.99% availability of objects, equal to just less than one hour of annual downtime.
Amazon Glacier Amazon Glacier is a low-cost storage service that offers secure, resilient, and flexible storage for data backup and archival. Amazon Glacier eases the administrative hassles of operating and scaling storage to AWS. This sets you free from worries about capacity planning, data replication, hardware provisioning, hardware failure detection and restoration, or prolonged hardware migrations. Business or organization can easily and cost effectively retain data for months, years, or decades.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Amazon EBS offers relentless, block-level storage volumes for Amazon EC2 applications within the same availability zone. Amazon EBS is ideal for Amazon EC2 applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block-level storage. Amazon S3 backups can be utilized to reconfigure applications in the cloud using Amazon EC2 computing power with attached Amazon EBS storage. Moreover, data backed up in Amazon S3 can leverage Amazon EBS to run additional computation or test/development workloads.
AWS Storage Gateway The AWS Storage Gateway is a service linking an on-premises software application with cloud-based storage to deliver secure and seamless integration between an organization’s on-premises IT environment and AWS’s storage infrastructure. The service helps you to store data safely to the AWS cloud for a scalable and cost-effective option.
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Amazon EFS stores arranges and manage your data in file systems. File systems are formed applying the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or the Amazon EFS API calls. Amazon EFS file systems are supple, and automatically scale and shrink as you add and remove files. Amazon EC2 instances load Amazon EFS file systems by means of standard file system mount tools, enabling your EC2 instances to access your file systems as local storage appliances. With Amazon EFS, multiple EC2 instances can derive your file system simultaneously, giving you a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one instance.

For feedback, you can write to us at sales.aws@novenitq.com
Reference: http://aws.amazon.com