A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how an organization will continue its operations in the event of a disruption or disaster. A BCP should cover all aspects of the business, such as human resources, facilities, communications, and IT systems. A BCP should also include a disaster recovery plan (DRP), which is a subset of the BCP that focuses on restoring IT systems and data after a disaster.
One of the benefits of using AWS cloud architecture is that it provides various capabilities and services that can help you design and implement a resilient and cost-effective BCP and DRP for your workloads. AWS offers multiple regions and availability zones that are geographically isolated and have independent power, cooling, and network infrastructures. AWS also offers services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS Backup, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS CloudEndure that can help you back up, replicate, restore, and automate your workloads across regions and zones.
To create a BCP and DRP for your AWS cloud architecture, you should first conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) and a risk assessment (RA) to identify the criticality, impact, and probability of disruption for each of your workloads. Based on the BIA and RA results, you should then determine the recovery objectives for each workload, such as recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO), recovery service level (RSL), and recovery cost objective (RCO). These objectives will help you choose the most appropriate DR strategy for each workload, such as backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, or multi-site.
After selecting the DR strategy for each workload, you should then design and implement your AWS cloud architecture according to the best practices and guidelines provided by AWS. You should also test and validate your BCP and DRP regularly to ensure that they meet your recovery objectives and business requirements. You should also review and update your BCP and DRP periodically to reflect any changes in your workloads or environment.
