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Disaster Recovery in Cloud Migration

Disaster Recovery in Cloud Migration

$249.00
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Self-paced • Lifetime updates
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Includes a practical, ready-to-use toolkit containing implementation templates, worksheets, checklists, and decision-support materials used to accelerate real-world application and reduce setup time.
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This curriculum spans the technical, operational, and governance dimensions of cloud disaster recovery with a scope and level of detail comparable to a multi-workshop advisory engagement focused on designing and maintaining a production-grade DR program across hybrid and multi-region cloud environments.

Module 1: Assessing Business Impact and Defining Recovery Objectives

  • Conduct stakeholder workshops to classify workloads by criticality, determining which systems require RTOs under four hours versus 24 hours.
  • Negotiate RTO and RPO targets with business units when conflicting priorities emerge between cost and availability requirements.
  • Document dependencies between on-premises systems and cloud-hosted components to avoid incomplete recovery scenarios.
  • Validate existing backup schedules against new application architectures, such as microservices with distributed data stores.
  • Identify regulatory requirements that mandate specific data residency or recovery verification procedures across regions.
  • Establish escalation paths for declaring a disaster when partial outages do not meet formal thresholds but impact operations.

Module 2: Cloud Provider Selection and Multi-Region Strategy

  • Evaluate regional service availability matrices to confirm that required compute, storage, and database services exist in both primary and recovery regions.
  • Compare inter-region data transfer costs and latency when selecting secondary regions for synchronous or asynchronous replication.
  • Assess IAM federation capabilities to ensure identity providers can authenticate users during failover when DNS redirection occurs.
  • Review provider SLAs for regional failover support, particularly for managed services with geographic constraints.
  • Determine whether multi-cloud DR introduces operational complexity that outweighs redundancy benefits for specific workloads.
  • Map provider-specific disaster scenarios (e.g., zone-level outages) to architectural decisions such as cross-availability zone replication.

Module 3: Data Replication and Storage Resilience Design

  • Configure storage-level replication (e.g., Azure Site Recovery, AWS Storage Gateway) while managing bandwidth constraints in hybrid environments.
  • Select between synchronous and asynchronous replication based on application consistency requirements and distance between regions.
  • Implement immutable backup policies to protect against ransomware, ensuring backups cannot be altered during a compromise.
  • Test snapshot chain integrity across long retention periods to prevent data loss due to corrupted incremental backups.
  • Design lifecycle policies that transition backups to lower-cost storage tiers without violating recovery time objectives.
  • Encrypt replicated data in transit and at rest using customer-managed keys, ensuring key availability in the recovery region.

Module 4: Application Architecture for Failover and Resilience

  • Refactor stateful applications to externalize session and configuration data into resilient stores like Redis or DynamoDB.
  • Implement health checks and circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures during partial cloud outages.
  • Design DNS failover mechanisms using routing policies (e.g., Route 53 failover records) with realistic TTL settings.
  • Containerize applications with persistent storage considerations, ensuring volumes are replicated or reattached during recovery.
  • Pre-provision auto-scaling groups in the recovery region to avoid launch failures due to capacity constraints during failover.
  • Validate third-party SaaS integrations can re-authenticate and resume operations after endpoint changes post-failover.

Module 5: Network and Connectivity Planning for DR

  • Establish redundant VPN or Direct Connect/ExpressRoute links with BGP failover configurations between on-premises and cloud.
  • Replicate firewall rules and security group configurations in the recovery region to maintain compliance posture.
  • Pre-allocate elastic IP addresses or public prefixes to reduce reconfiguration time during failover.
  • Test DNS propagation delays when redirecting traffic, particularly for globally distributed user bases.
  • Configure VPC peering or transit gateway attachments in the recovery region to restore inter-application connectivity.
  • Document and automate network topology recreation scripts to reduce manual errors during emergency recovery.

Module 6: Automation, Orchestration, and Runbook Development

  • Develop runbooks that specify manual intervention points in automated failover workflows, such as data consistency verification.
  • Use infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) to ensure recovery environment parity with production.
  • Integrate orchestration tools (e.g., AWS Step Functions, Azure Logic Apps) to sequence database failover before application startup.
  • Implement conditional logic in automation scripts to detect partial failures and prevent incomplete recovery states.
  • Store and version control runbooks in source repositories with audit trails for compliance and change tracking.
  • Simulate automation failures during drills to evaluate fallback procedures and operator decision-making under stress.

Module 7: Testing, Validation, and Continuous DR Operations

  • Schedule regular failover tests during maintenance windows, coordinating with application teams to minimize user impact.
  • Measure actual RTO and RPO during tests and adjust configurations or resource allocations to meet targets.
  • Conduct tabletop exercises for scenarios where full failover is not viable, such as provider-wide outages.
  • Monitor replication lag and alert on thresholds that risk exceeding defined RPOs for critical databases.
  • Update DR plans after major application changes, including version upgrades or architectural refactoring.
  • Integrate DR monitoring into existing observability platforms to centralize alerting and reduce tool sprawl.

Module 8: Governance, Compliance, and Audit Readiness

  • Define ownership for DR plan maintenance, ensuring accountability for updates and test results.
  • Document evidence of DR testing for auditors, including timestamps, participant logs, and outcome reports.
  • Align data retention and recovery procedures with GDPR, HIPAA, or other jurisdictional requirements.
  • Restrict access to DR automation tools and recovery environments using just-in-time privilege elevation.
  • Conduct access reviews for DR-specific IAM roles to prevent privilege creep over time.
  • Archive post-incident reviews from past outages to refine recovery procedures and training materials.
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