IT Disaster Recovery Policy Development

Understanding IT Contingency Planning Information Technology (IT) contingency planning is vital in ensuring organizational resilience. It is a key component of a broader continuity strategy that integrates business operations, risk management, communication protocols, financial planning, and security measures. While each aspect functions independently, they form a cohesive framework to safeguard organizational stability. Contingency planning for IT systems involves creating backup solutions and recovery procedures to address potential risks—whether natural, technological, or human-induced. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlines a comprehensive seven-step approach in Special Publication 800-34 to guide organizations in developing effective contingency plans. From initial policy development and impact analysis to preventive measures, recovery strategies, and plan testing, each phase ensures robust preparedness. A critical part of this process is embedding recovery capabilities into system designs during their development lifecycle, ensuring readiness throughout implementation, operation, and eventual disposal phases. Key Elements of Effective IT Contingency Planning 1. Policy Creation: Establishing objectives, roles, responsibilities, and maintenance schedules. 2. Business Impact Analysis (BIA): This process involves identifying critical resources and setting recovery time objectives (RTOs). 3. Preventive Controls: To minimize risks, implement measures like uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and frequent data backups. 4. Recovery Strategies: Designing plans to restore operations efficiently while considering budgetary constraints and system dependencies. 5. Plan Development: Document detailed procedures for recovery, aligned with organizational roles and system priorities. 6. Training and Testing: Preparing teams through exercises to ensure readiness and system reliability during disruptions. 7. Plan Maintenance: Regularly updating and validating the plan to reflect changing personnel, systems, and priorities. A well-crafted IT contingency plan is not just a response mechanism but a proactive strategy to maintain organizational resilience. By aligning technical recovery strategies with business continuity objectives, organizations can navigate disruptions effectively, protecting both operations and data integrity. How does your organization approach IT contingency planning? Let’s share insights and best practices! Be the Solution 🔒 | Secure Once, Comply Many ✅ #ITContingencyPlanning #BusinessContinuity #CyberResilience #RiskManagement #ITSecurity #DataRecovery #NISTGuidelines

Waiting until you have an incident to understand which of your systems are critical can have serious consequences, sometimes even life or death consequences. Here is an unusual example: It was recently reported that hackers launched a ransomware attack on a Swiss farmer's computer system, disrupting the flow of vital data from a milking robot. See https://lnkd.in/eVhzu429. The farmer apparently did not want to pay a $10K ransom, and thought he didn't really need data on the amount of milk produced in the short term. In addition, the milking robot also worked without a computer or network connection. The cows could therefore continue to be milked. The farmer, however, apparently didn't account for the fact that the data at issue was particularly important for pregnant animals. As a result of the attack, the farmer was unable to recognize that one calf was dying in the womb, and in the end, this lack of data may have prevented the famer from saving the calf. While most of us will hopefully not find themselves in this exact situation, the takeaways are the same for all of us: 1. CONDUCT A BIA: Consider conducting a business impact assessment (BIA) to understand the criticality and maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) of all your systems, processes, and activities, from a business or commercial standpoint. Of course, such analysis should include the health and safety impact of downtime. 2. VENDORS: As part of the BIA, consider assessing the MTD for each vendor as well. This will help you decide which primary vendors require a secondary, as well as define the terms of your contract with the secondary vendors. More details on backup vendors can be found here: https://lnkd.in/e-eVNvQz. 3. UPDATE YOUR BC/DR PLAN: Once you have conducted a BIA, update your business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan to ensure that that your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are consistent with the MTD determined through your BIA. 4. PRACTICE: Conduct regular incident response (IR) and BC/DR tabletop exercises, as well as full failover exercises, to test and improve your ability to respond to a real event. Advice on conducting successful tabletop exercises can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eKrgV9Cg. Stay safe out there!

🔥 A while back, I was given the challenge of designing a Disaster Recovery strategy for a 3-tier architecture. No pressure, right? 😅   Challenge accepted, obstacles overcome, mission accomplished: my e-commerce application is now fully resilient to AWS regional outages.   So, how did I pull this off? Well… let me take you into a world where disasters are inevitable, but strategic planning, resilience and preparedness turn challenges into success—just like in life. ☺️   Firstly, I identified critical data that needed to be replicated/backed up to ensure failover readiness. Based on this, I defined the RPO and RTO and selected the warm standby strategy, which shaped the solution: Route 53 ARC for manual failover, AWS Backup for EBS volume replication, Aurora Global DB for near real-time replication, and S3 Cross-Region Replication.   Next, I built a Terraform stack, and ran a drill to see how it works. Check out the GitHub repo and Medium post for the full story. Links in the comments. 👇   Workflow: ➡️ The primary site is continuously monitored with CloudWatch alarms set at the DB, ASG, and ALB levels. Email notifications are sent via SNS to the monitoring team. ➡️ The monitoring team informs the decision-making committee. If a failover is necessary, the workload will be moved to the secondary site. ➡️ Warm-standby strategy: the recovery infra is pre-deployed at a scaled-down capacity until needed. ➡️ EBS volumes: are restored from the AWS Backup vault and attached to EC2 instances, which are then scaled up to handle traffic. ➡️ Aurora Global Database: Two clusters are configured across regions. Failover promotes the secondary to primary within a minute, with near-zero RPO (117ms lag). ➡️ S3 CRR: Data is asynchronously replicated bi-directionally between buckets. ➡️ Route 53: Alias DNS records are configured for each external ALB, mapping them to the same domain. ➡️ ARC: Two routing controls manage traffic failover manually. Routing control health checks connect routing controls to the corresponding DNS records, making possible switching between sites. ➡️ Failover Execution: After validation, a script triggers the routing controls, redirecting traffic from the primary to the secondary region.   👉 Lessons learned: ⚠️ The first time I attempted to manually switch sites, it happened automatically due to a misconfigured Route Control Health Check. This could have led to unintended failover—not exactly the kind of "automation" I was aiming for.   Grateful beyond words for your wisdom and support Vlad, Călin Damian Tănase, Anda-Catalina Giraud ☁️, Mark Bennett, Julia Khakimzyanova, Daniel. Thank you, your guidance means a lot to me!   💡Thinking about using ARC? Be aware that it's billed hourly. To make the most of it, I documented every step in the article. Or, you can use the TF code to deploy it. ;)   💬Would love to hear your thoughts—how do you approach DR in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture?