RS2 Smart Processing Limited Implements Fast and Resilient Disaster Recovery Using AWS

Banks, payment gateways, and ATMs use RS2’s BankWORKS software as a service. It is capable of processing more than seven million transactions an hour and runs 24/7 in 27 countries around the world. RS2 began using the cloud in a hybrid model in 2012 and migrated fully to AWS in 2018 to remove the maintenance needs associated with on-premises infrastructure and hardware and to improve the company’s scalability by eliminating hardware upgrade needs. All the company’s file servers, source code servers, and servers for day-to-day work and development are now hosted on AWS. After this migration, Robert Micallef, infrastructure team leader at RS2, and Serdar Yalçın, senior member of the infrastructure team at RS2, sought a new cloud-based disaster recovery solution for its previously on-premises infrastructure.

RS2 needed to meet client-compliance requirements and pass audits, including one audit each year that requires failing over and running operations from RS2’s recovery site for 24 hours, then failing back to its primary site. RS2’s solution is Payment Card Industry certified and needed to meet a specific recovery time objective (RTO), the time to return to normal processes after a failure or outage, and recovery point objective (RPO), how much data can be lost during a failure or outage. The goal of this yearly drill is to validate that the company can recover and run critical applications from its recovery AWS Region and then fail back to its primary AWS Region while meeting recovery objectives.

RS2 chose Elastic Disaster Recovery because the service provided the capabilities that the company required. “Overall, the combination of AWS advanced technology and comprehensive support made Elastic Disaster Recovery the clear choice for our disaster recovery needs,” says Clive Gerada, infrastructure manager at RS2. The speed of deployment and ability to meet recovery objectives and compliance requirements were crucial factors for RS2. The company also wanted to use an AWS product to scale its infrastructure. “As early adopters of new technologies, we considered it critical that what we use was going to grow with us,” says Gerada. “The fintech space has been cautious of where data sits in the cloud, and using Elastic Disaster Recovery, we can make sure the right security protocols are in place.” The company implemented Elastic Disaster Recovery on 44 servers running on AWS in May 2022 and completed deployment in July 2022.

RS2 performed its first 24-hour disaster recovery audit drill, performing a full disaster recovery scenario, with the new solution in place at the end of October 2022. Before this disaster recovery failover, the company tested everything using Elastic Disaster Recovery, which bolstered confidence before the drill and established cross-Region application resilience. During this audit drill, the company ran all workloads in production in its secondary disaster recovery Region, including writing production data. RS2 successfully worked in disaster recovery mode for over 24 hours. “The disaster recovery failover went smoothly, and our required RTOs and RPOs were more than achieved,” says Gerada. “Afterward, the AWS team was happy to engage with us on improving processes, which was fantastic.” Using Elastic Disaster Recovery, RS2 achieves an average of 30 minutes for RTO and less than 1 minute for RPO, which is well under its 1-hour RPO compliance requirement.

Another important feature of Elastic Disaster Recovery is the speed of the failback sync process, which RS2 requires to return to working in its primary Region as fast as possible after disaster recovery. The company made sure that all systems and applications were fully synced in the primary Region, then it completed the failback procedures. “We were looking for a solution that was easy on our team, easy on the system administrators who manage the disaster recovery failover and failback, and could be implemented as quickly as possible,” says Gerada. “Using Elastic Disaster Recovery, we achieved that.”

Using Elastic Disaster Recovery, RS2 takes comfort in knowing that its solution facilitates its employees’ uninterrupted access to work systems. Even a few minutes of downtime for over 400 employees can result in hours of lost work. Using Elastic Disaster Recovery, if something happens to data in one Region, the company can quickly recover in a different Region without losing a significant amount of data. “We looked at all the possible products that we could use for cloud-based disaster recovery,” says Gerada. “By far, we know we made the right choice for us in choosing Elastic Disaster Recovery.”

Having more than achieved its disaster recovery goals, RS2 is exploring further improving its software as a service using AWS. The company is looking to implement more microservices for its current infrastructure and is exploring AWS services such as AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service used to run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. The company is working on implementing a microservices architecture using Kubernetes and is exploring additional serverless AWS services for use alongside AWS Lambda whenever possible. RS2 believes these AWS services could be greatly beneficial for the business.

“Using Elastic Disaster Recovery has been absolutely critical to our modernization strategy and migration to the cloud,” says Gerada.