Tag: disaster recovery

Many public sector organizations that are moving to the cloud often misunderstand that the architecture of AWS Regions and Availability Zones fundamentally changes how they should think about disaster recovery and resiliency. In this blog post, I share some best practices to answer common questions about building highly available workloads, and share some ways to consider high availability, disaster recovery, and application resiliency within AWS.

Disaster recovery is a crucial investment for public sector organizations. However, out-of-date disaster recovery and business continuity planning (BCP) policies prevent organizations from improving in these essential areas—like the assumption that the more distance between data centers, the better. But is there a point where more distance between data centers has diminishing risk mitigation returns? Enter the Goldilocks zone for disaster recovery, in which the distance between data centers is not too close, not too far, but just right.

After Rockdale County, Georgia was the victim of two cyber attacks, the jurisdiction turned to the cloud to strengthen the county’s security position. They worked with AWS Partner Tyler Technologies, Inc. to help with their migration, which not only enhanced data security and continuity of operations, but also reduced network downtime by 99 percent, while streamlining budgeting and reducing the IT staff’s burden.

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, cell towers, power lines, and telephone and internet cable are often damaged or destroyed, limiting the ability for responders to share data and access the internet. The AWS Disaster Response team conducted a field testing operation designed to replicate a common disaster response scenario, to show how to establish an ad-hoc network at field sites with limited connectivity and create a link to an office headquarters to provide access to cloud-based resources and data to responders in the field.

Higher education institutions that hadn’t previously considered the cloud prior to the pandemic are now investigating how to begin their cloud journey. In this blog post, we highlight some strategies and first projects to help higher education institutions get started with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud simply and efficiently. 

Learn how you can build a foundation of security objectives practices, including a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, that can be adapted to meet a dynamic policy environment and support the missions of national computer security incident response teams (CSIRT), operators of essential services (OES), digital service providers (DSP), and other identified sector organizations.

Severe and extreme weather events not only wreak havoc on lives, property and the economy, but the extent of the destruction and devastation left behind can be difficult to map and quantify. Having high resolution imagery of areas devastated by weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and etc.) helps to characterize impacts, formulate needed recovery and response activities, support emergency managers in saving lives, and restart the flow of commerce. NOAA’s data plays a critical role in this process. As part of ASDI, we invited Jena Kent from NOAA’s Big Data Program to share how AWS is helping with disaster response by providing access to aerial data and imagery through open data initiatives.

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.

Even though Amazon S3 provides regional data resiliency, customers often have compliance and business requirements to replicate their data to a second Region that is hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away from their primary location. Amazon S3 replication provides an automatic mechanism to make identical copies of your objects in a destination Region of your choice. Replication enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across S3 buckets. Learn how to configure S3 Cross Region Replication with S3 RTC feature, and do a walk-through of how to configure event notification for S3 replication events and configuring Amazon CloudWatch alarms for the replication metrics.

In a world where data is produced and handled at unprecedented speeds and quantities, the need for effective methods to securely store, analyze, and interpret this data is more important now than ever. As agencies within the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community turn to cloud adoption, they are able to bring new capabilities closer to the tactical edge and accelerate their digital transformation. Agencies can effectively leverage these new technologies such as AI, ML, and data analytics to free up time and resources for warfighters and analysts to focus on mission critical tasks.