In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses around the world are struggling to survive. They are encouraged to implement business continuity plans (BCP) to minimise disruption to their operations and to ensure that their business remains viable during the pandemic.
In the event of a disruption, enterprises must move swiftly to review the vendor population and determine which are critical, operate in affected regions or likely to be impacted. For a business to be resilient, it must be built on principles of security, and be ready to recover quickly from any event that affects business continuity.
BCP is one of the most critical activities enterprises conduct with their stakeholders. However, it is also often regarded as a distraction from ongoing tactical and strategic tasks, especially during a pandemic. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) goes hand-in-hand with BCP, but planning and execution is costly, time consuming and most importantly, prone to mis-steps.
AWS Data Migration Services (DMS) uses a phased approach to migrate their on-prem database disaster recovery (DR) to the cloud. It helps enterprises migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely and can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases. Businesses of all sizes can use DMS to enable faster DR of their critical IT systems without having to set up a second physical site.
- Big savings on data storage costs
With AWS DMS, enterprises can avoid huge upfront investments on servers, PCs and other data storage devices by migrating data to the cloud. Once on the cloud, huge amounts of data can be safely stored, without the need for IT infrastructure investments.
- Increased collaboration and flexible scalability
Data migration to cloud can offer immense benefits for collaboration. Data shared on the cloud can be easily accessed by employees and they can also work simultaneously on shared documents. Cloud computing also enables team members to log in and work from anywhere, any time.
- Reliable backup facility
When data is on local servers or PCs, enterprises often tend to neglect the task of regularly backing up their data. However, data migration to cloud offers a regular, reliable backup process. Cloud providers offer superior data backup solutions and data management applications to ensure that data backup is regularly carried out to prevent any loss of data.
- Pay-per-use billing
With cloud computing, businesses can pay for exactly what and how much they use. They can also benefit from timely software upgrades from cloud providers without any extra costs.
- Superior disaster recovery
In the event of a disruption, data migration to cloud will make disaster recovery much easier, as cloud systems are often set up to automatically back up data at regular intervals.
A traditional DR site requires a large capital investment and at least 6 to 9 months to set up. For some enterprises, DR sites double as a test/dev platform to utilise idle resources.
Setting up a DR site on AWS requires less investment and can be set up quickly. Data is migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) via AWS DMS with CDC (Change Data Capture). Enterprises can achieve near zero RTO/RPO since most of the data in the on-prem database is transferred to DMS with CDC continuously replicating the delta changes.
By using AWS RDS as a database, enterprises only pay for what they use, and can scale on-demand, according to their business needs.
This solution works effectively during Proof of Concept (POC) with sample test data. However, with actual production data depending on an enterprise’s data size, VPN over internet transfer becomes sub-optimal once data crosses a certain threshold. This affects the ability to provide near-zero RTO/RPO.
This is largely due to network latency, as how data gets from point A to B varies over Internet-based connections. With AWS Direct Connect, data is transferred through a dedicated connection, providing a more consistent network experience. Find out more about this from Singtel, an AWS certified Direct Connect Service Delivery Partner.
By automating the database failover, enterprises reduce human error. An IT personnel can easily trigger the automated database failover and allow the system to start the process.
By using DMS with CDC, enterprises can (1) achieve near-zero RTO/RPO, (2) reduce operational costs and (3) scale on demand.
