Hello and welcome to this lecture, where I will quickly talk about how cloud storage plays an important part within your disaster recovery plans.

If you're unfortunate enough to encounter a disaster within your environment, that affects multiple tiers within your on-site infrastructure, it will more than likely result in data outage and/or data loss, and you'll need to invoke your DR plans to restore your data via your chosen backup mechanism.

The sooner your systems are operational and readily available to resume services, the better for you as a business and your customers.

Now herein lies the problem with traditional data backup solutions. The data you need might not be available to you, and this could be due to a variety of reasons.

Your backup data might be stored in the same location as your production data, and so the disaster, such as a fire or flood or worse, would have impacted your backup data too.

If using a tape backup method, then the tapes could be faulty, due to overuse, and the data become unreadable, or even lost in transit.

There may also be manual activity involved, from tape rotation to tape labeling, which may result in specific data not being backed up or not being able to find the right data.

There are also many other reasons of why the traditional data backup method can be ineffective, such as scalability.

As your infrastructure expands, so will your NAS or SAN and tape libraries. This can be very costly to maintain and implement.

Costs, implementing an effective backup solution can be a huge up-front capital expenditure cost to many companies.

And data availability, if your data is being stored off-site, the retrieval of your data could be impacted.

It's no secret that using cloud storage services can be considerably cheaper as a backup solution than that of your own on-premise solution. But cost aside, the speed in which you can launch an environment within AWS to replicate your on-premise solution, with easy access to production backup data, is of significant value to many organizations.

If you had your production environment running locally within your corporate data center, whereby your core data was being backed up and stored within AWS, you wouldn't have to worry about scalability. There is an almost infinite amount of storage available to you. There would be no huge up-front costs, where you had to buy a specific infrastructure or tape libraries, and your data will be protected by exceptional durability and availability combined. Couple this with strict security measures, and you have a cost-efficient, highly reliable, durable, and secure data backup storage solution.

Now let's imagine this production environment, in your local data center, experienced an outage. You could perform the following steps to quickly recover from the disaster.

You could launch a new environment with new instances, based on your own custom AMIs, complete with custom applications within a VPC. Then you could create EBS storage volumes, based on your backed up data, from within AWS, and attach these volumes to those instances. You now have your application servers up and running, with the latest production data. Couple this with some minor networking components, and you could then communicate with other sites you may have running.

So to highlight the main points of how cloud-based storage is effective when using DR, it is cost efficient, scalable, available and durable, secure, reliable, zero maintenance of hardware required, it's off-site storage, replication and automation is easily configured, it's readily accessible, and it's easy to test DR plans, using AWS infrastructure.

The following resources relate to topics covered and mentioned throughout this lecture. We have a course within the Solutions Architect - Professional Certification learning path that covers high availability, scalability, and business continuity, and also a blog that covers disaster recovery, when using AWS, so it's worth checking those out.

You can find all links mentioned within each lecture at the top of the transcript, on the landing page of this course.

That brings me to the end of this short lecture.

Coming up next, I want to highlight some of the considerations when planning a DR storage solution.

Lectures

Introduction

Where does Cloud Storage fit in DR?

Considerations when planning an AWS DR Storage Solution

Using Amazon S3 as a Data Backup Solution

Using AWS Snowball for Data Transfer

Using AWS Storage Gateway for on-premise data backup

Summary